


A Silent Blade

by Aleph (Immatrael), EarthScorpion



Series: Ascensions and Transgressions [9]
Category: Exalted
Genre: Gen, Role-Playing Game, Roleplay Logs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-23 12:42:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 78,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13788003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Immatrael/pseuds/Aleph, https://archiveofourown.org/users/EarthScorpion/pseuds/EarthScorpion
Summary: Woe to Keris, that her return to her homeland must be bathed in blood and death. But if she must be a swift and silent monster to learn where her birthplace lies... then so be it.





	1. Chapter 1

It is the day before Keris plans to leave. Lilunu has invited her for high tea on her farm. Sitting under the veranda, they drink incredibly expensive delicacies of Hell and eat tiny hand-made cakes produced by demon artisans. Outside, the grass is currently made of emeralds and the stone-fleeced sheep gleam in the green light.

“Do you expect to be away for long?” Lilunu asks softly. She’s dressed in soft spider-silk, and looks particularly pale and ephemeral today.

“It depends,” says Keris. “The assassination... that won’t take too long. I can cover myself in a lie to look deathly, and then it’s just a matter of killing him. But Baisha...”

She scowls. “If there are people still living there, I want to meet them. And if the slave route that took me from it is still running, I’m going to burn it to the ground and kill everyone involved. That might take a little longer.”

“I see,” Lilunu says, not caring at all about Keris’ threats. “Well, if you do see anything interesting about the local artwork or the like, do remember to bring me examples - or maybe even a few artisans, if they’re interested in coming. I do believe it’s the coldest time of the year in Creation, is it not? Remember to wrap up warm.”

The scowl disappears in favour of a smile. “I’ll bring you back lots of paintings of the Scavenger Lands, milady,” Keris promises. “And I’ll be sure to pay attention to their art styles along the way.”

“Are you taking any of your little pet humans with you?” she asks. “They’ll need to wrap up even more.”

“Kuha is coming,” Keris nods. “My little owlrider, if you remember? But I won’t be taking my ship. No real point.” She clears her throat and lowers her voice, though there are no servants currently close enough to overhear their conversation. “Will you give Bruleuse my regards? I would have liked to play for him again before leaving, but there was so little time around our spell-crafting. Perhaps when I return?”

Lilunu nods gravely, and leans in closer. “There are... whispers of certain high level negotiations,” she says, lips barely moving, face a placid, smiling mask. “Affairs of the Unquestionable you are not permitted to know of. But,” and now her words are so soft that they’re only in the air she breathes, so soft that Keris’ ears have to strain to hear them, “I may have another soul soon. I fear how they will suffer.”

Keris moves less than an inch before brutally suppressing her immediate reaction, which is to hug Lilunu and murmur infinite sympathies. Instead, she turns it into a brief sway towards her mentor, and lets her hair coil around a hand and hold firm.

“When I return,” she murmurs thickly, “I would be glad to let you spend time with Zanara again. They think most highly of you, and I hope their company brings you some respite from your troubles.”

Lilunu smiles. “I would love to see that sweet little child again,” she says. “And I’ve had some of my servants pack five days of food for you and deliver it to your townhouse - and my love’s lightbridge will take you to the grand gates on the outermost layer.”

“My humble thanks, milady,” Keris says, rising with a grunt of effort to bow as low as her pregnancy allows. “In that case, I will be on my way, the better to return soon.”

“Of course, of course.” Lilunu wraps Keris up in a grand, sweeping, florid hug. It’s sweet and adorable, but Keris can’t help but shiver when she smells a hint of the ozone and blood odour of Adorjan in the melange of smells that seeps from Lilunu.

After making her farewells, she jogs - _jogs_ , honestly, this pregnancy is really starting to weigh her down - to her townhouse to pick up Kuha and the food.

“I’m ready for you two to come out, you know,” she says as she goes. “Any time you like. As long as it’s soon. Really.”

Her son wriggles slightly and jabs her bladder with a stretched elbow. Keris curses and speeds up slightly. Sasi never mentioned _that_ part of pregnancy in her complaints, dammit.

“Alright, Kuha,” she announces upon finding the short woman with Cissidy and Rounen, having finished a recent flight. “Packed and ready to go?”

“Yes, Kerishyra.” Kuha has spent the past few months learning the things that one of Keris’ Gales could teach her. She now speaks Rivertongue, although with an intensely strange accent that’s about two parts her native language to one part Nexan to about half a part Old Realm. “I will be glad to get back to somewhere with proper night, where it isn’t so loud and where it isn’t so _hot_.”

Kuha is a North-Westerner, and has been suffering in the heat of Hell. She’s been wandering around in a chest wrap and harem pants, and she’s still covered in sweat.

Keris nods. “Mount up, then. We’ll be taking a lightbridge to the outermost layer. And we have some talking to do on the way.”

Once they’re saddled up and riding, Keris explains. “You know we’re going to the Scavenger Lands, for an assassination and to seek my hometown. It would be for the best if we didn’t attract too much attention as visible foreigners there. Will you let me make some changes in your body - temporary ones - to make you look more like a native?”

She pauses. “... I can probably help you handle the heat better once we’re back down in the Southwest, actually. In fact I can help _me_ handle the heat better. I should have thought of that earlier.”

Kuha’s eyes light up. “What kind of changes?” she asks, enthusiastically. “The ability to turn into one of the local birds? The way that you can run so fast and never tire, to me as well?”

“It’s not that hot,” Rounen protests.

“Colouring and features, for now,” Keris says. “To help you blend in. Those I’ll reverse. For more than that...” She purses her lips, considering. “I might be able to do the bird one, but... hmm.” She considers. “That might need alchemy. But I’ll see if I can do it on my own. The running, probably not.”

A thought strikes her, and she grins. “Tell you what; if you’re that enthusiastic, make a list of changes you might like. Get Rounen to help. I’ll see what I can do while we’re there - and later, when we go back to the Southwest.”

The look in her eyes suggests that the list will be a long one. But then again, perhaps that makes sense for Kuha. For most of her life, her body was a wasted, sickly thing. And... uh, she does have Keris to compare herself to and come up short.

They gallop on, and it’s not too long before down below the towering, mountain-dwarfing gates of Hell are visible in the sky above them. They’re approaching them at a horrific speed, because of the light bridge. Just how fast they were travelling becomes obvious, once they leave the bridge and it takes their mounts ten minutes to pass through the dark tunnel-depths of the thick, thick walls.

And then they’re out, Ligier is no longer directly overhead, and underneath them is the silver sand of Cecelyne. It’ll be five days to Creation, coming out through the same hidden gate that Keris used to get to Matasque. Then almost 1500 miles south to Taira, following the Grey River. It’s going to be a long trip.

In this, Keris is somewhat annoyed. Were she entirely alone, fifteen hundred miles would be the work of a leisurely day spent swimming, with perhaps a break for lunch and a nap as well as a few absent-minded barge-robberies. With Kuha, travelling only by night on anyaglo-back and staying out of sight, it might take as much as a week.

... admittedly, this is still considerably better than the four months of upstream rowing that would be needed to get that far by riverboat. But the principle of the matter still irks her.

Keris makes sure to keep moving for the trip across Cecelyne. True, it doesn’t matter how much distance they traverse or how fast they go, but it’s better to stay mobile in the Endless Desert. It means that when you hear a glassstorm on the horizon, there’s no need to scramble to pack up and get out of the way. And it makes it much harder for the things roaming around the infinite sands to stumble across you. When Cissidy gets tired, she shifts Kuha into her hair and sends her demon familiars back to the Domain to rest. Those periods of running are like catnaps for Keris, and she stays awake and watchful for the entire trip; ears alert for danger.

Things go fairly quietly, and five days later she emerges in the cave some distance from Matasque. Stepping out, it’s night here. From the look of the sky, it’s...

... it’s nighttime, okay? Keris is a city girl. She’s vaguely familiar with the idea that some people can tell what time of day it is from the position of... like, the stars and the moon and stuff, but to Keris, once it’s dark, it’s dark.

There’s a nip to the air, too. It smells like frost. She remembers how it was in Matasque, with snow on the ground. She hasn’t seen snow since she was in the North East with Testolagh. Well, okay, and the artificial bonsai mountain that Lilunu is growing, but that doesn’t count.

Indulgently, she allows Kuha to spin around happily in the cool air, point up at the stars and bury her fingers in the soil of Creation. Her eyes and ears turn towards Matasque briefly, and Ogi...

Keris shakes that fleeting thought away with a morose sigh. Ilumiha Pologi is better off without Keris in her life, and two years hasn’t done anything to change that. Pulling her maps of the Scavenger Lands out, she cocks an ear to the landscape and listens for the sound of water, and whistles for Kuha’s attention once she finds the slow, majestic flow of the Yanaze. They’re on the northern bank _here_ , which means means _that_ way is South, and it’s flowing _that_ way which must be West, and... yeah, okay, she’s oriented. Ish.

“Come on Kuha,” she says. Perhaps she’s a little shorter than usual, but it would be hard to tell. “Mount up again; we have some nighttime to use on travel. I wanna get us across the Yanaze and past Nexus before daybreak. And we need to stay fifty miles away from it, so that means the western bank of the Grey River. We can cut overland to shave off a few hundred miles - we might be able to reach Maruka tomorrow night if we push.”

Flexing her shoulders, Kuha bounces up and down on her toes and does a peculiar set of stretches. “Yes, okay, Kerishyra,” she says. “I was just thinking we might want to eat.”

A rumbling growl emerges from Keris’s stomach in support of this idea, and she wrinkles her nose. “Alright, give me a moment to go hunting. Rounen, do you think you can cook something on the move if I bring back a brace of rabbits? You have your little blowpipe now.”

The blowpipe in question sits proudly at Rounen’s hip; a brass piece bought from Ligier’s markets that was intended for the fiery breath of the neomah. It works rather well with sziromkeruby fire, and her little scribe is immensely proud of his new toy.

After a hot meal of rabbit and the last of Lilunu’s supplies - which were excellent and she has very expensive cooks - they’re on their way again. Apart from the initial shortcut overland to avoid a pointless eastern bend, Keris follows the Grey River southward. It’s not difficult to do - trade on the river is a constant, day or night, and Cissidy gallops high enough that it’s easy for Keris to keep the lights of trade barges on her left in the corner of her eye. They rejoin the river near the Marukan Redoubt, and from there it’s just a matter of following the bank down to Taira.

The core of the problem that arises is that this land is the Confederacy of Rivers. That means there’s a _lot_ of rivers. Rivers everywhere. They have rivers, literally, for days.

But apart from a small confusion with a city beside a river heading south that in the dark nearly tricked Keris into thinking it was Nexus and thus she was lost, things go pretty well once she gets to the Grey River.

The lands of the River Province are still green, even as the season of Air ticks on, but as she heads south the land dries out and the savannahs and plains of the Marukan lands come up - and then by. The land rises as she heads south, the Grey River cutting through the steep provinces, and she sees striated landscapes and jagged, dry cliffsides.

If her map is right, this must be the Vakotan badlands she’s heading south through. And to the west, she sees a vast ruined city - the ruins of Helma, she thinks, if her map is right. She could pause to check, or she could push on. She’s tempted... but no. She’s on-mission at the moment, and she wants this assassination done quickly, so that she can move on to Baisha. There’ll be time to mess around and explore later, once her agreement with Orange Blossom is sorted out.

The land south of the badlands is far drier and higher than the savannahs of the Marukan lands. Keris hears a clash between two groups of horse-riders, dressed in bright colours.

More noticeable, however, is the sizable convoy of slave-barges she sees heading north downriver. And smells, tasting the scent of too many people crammed in together on the breeze, too close together. And hears. Oh, does she hear them. There’s a wailing of the voices of children, men and women coming from that.

And worse, some of the accents ping off old memories. They sound _familiar_.

It’s late-evening. The sun is setting, painting the land blood red. The barges have large paddle-wheels, run by the oxen on the turning wheels. The lanterns on the riverboat barges make them very clear, and they fly the insignia of the Nexan Guild.

Keris slows to a stop and puts Kuha down. Sitting her down firmly in the shade of a hillside populated by scrub and one or two jutting rocks, she pulls a firmin-resin blowpipe and a set of poisoned darts out of her hair from the armoury within her soul.

“Stay. Here.” she commands. Then she sets off for the barges.

The need for subtlety is a faint one, which speaks in vain with Dulmea’s voice in the background of Calesco, Vali and Rathan’s fury, but Keris retains just enough awareness to pull her shadow over herself. The woman who slips into the Grey River isn’t pregnant, and her hair is the dark brown that Keris bore before her Exaltation and falls only to her waist.

Her features, though, aren’t changed. Few enough people will see them that it won’t matter.

Her Lance drops into her hands with a flicker as Keris swings herself up onto the first boat and guts the men at the stern. Her hair catches them as they fall backwards and lowers them into the water without a splash. Silently; her face twisted in hate, Keris moves onto the next ones.

At six in the evening, the boats were paddling along fine.

At seven, every single guard and most of the merchants are dead. The hallways of the ships are a bloodbath - and yet there are no bodies. And, spear in hand, Keris stands on the house-barge, the one where the merchants lived and where they kept their families - because they weren’t going to live on the slave barges - considering what to do with the few remaining living merchants and their children here. Many of whom she probably just orphaned.

((... h8 u. argh.))  
((Stupid useless Calesco))

She’s hearing things. There are voices in her head.

Unlike most people who can claim this, Keris is perfectly sane. The voices are of her children.

“They’re guilty,” hisses Rathan, implacable in his hatred. “They’re part of this. They deserve to die.”

“They don’t matter,” insists Vali, stubborn in his insistence. “Make sure the slaves are free. Break all the chains.”

“They’re innocent,” says Calesco, painful in her mercy. “The children didn’t have a choice. Let them go.”

Up until now, they had been getting along rather well.

((Okay, might as well make this easy and just roll for each soul. Rathan - 0. Vali - 3. Calesco - 3. Simple enough to resolve.))

In Keris’ head, things degenerate once Vali punches Rathan in the nose, and then Calesco gets him in a headlock. Apparently the time that Vali and Calesco spent together when no other souls were around has led to them bonding, and what they’re bonding over right now is Calesco holding Rathan still and pinning his hair so Vali can punch him.

Keris will probably need to put a stop to that later, but for now, she’s made up her mind.

She looks over at the huddled, terrified merchants who aren’t even going for their weapons despite the fact they’ve got them. After all, they just saw Eko kill the three men at the door as Keris stepped past in a single motion.

((... actually. Can I use Price-of-Everything Undercurrents to see what it would be worth to them for Keris to spare their lives, and then use Kindness Expects Repayment to instill a horrible sense of gratitude for letting them live?))  
((PoEU gives the result that “don’t kill me please” is worth “everything they own”, which is largely Resources 2-4, but there’s Resources 5 from the elderly woman in the fine Guild robes in the centre.))  
((Also, hmm, by RAW it’s a one-on-one thing, not a group thing.))  
((ST judgement?))  
((The charm itself only directs at the richest one, the guilder in charge of this all, if Keris chooses to spare her life. Otherwise, she can pick someone else.))

She sweeps her spear across the group.

“You care about your own lives,” she snarls in furious Rivertongue, “but the men and women and children - the _people_ \- you have chained up and _screaming_ ; those you sell like cattle. You want to hate and fear me for killing your men, but you hold _yourselves_ up as though you’ve done nothing wrong. You’re disgusting.”

There are whimpers from the group. Her spear comes to a rest on the old woman in the middle.

“I should kill you all right now. I should tie you up and give you to _them_ ; the ones who you took from their homes. That would be _fair_ , wouldn’t it? That would be _balanced_.”

Her snarl fades into a disdainful sneer.

“But I’m not _you_. Run. Abandon your slave-barges, run a long, long way away, and _pray_ that I never find you doing this again. Because next time I will not be so merciful.” She turns on her heel, tossing one comment back over her shoulder.

“Your cargo was never yours, but I’m letting you keep your lives. _Be grateful_.”

Keris feels the words sink in as she leaves, slipping away to the other barges and steering them into the shoreline. The family-barge keeps going downriver as she gently sets the oxen free onto the land and goes about cutting any chains that haven’t already been unlocked. Most of the prisoners are weak. By the time they’re in any condition to start getting ideas about revenge, the family-barge will be long gone. What the merchants do with their future is up to them, but Keris is fairly sure that it won’t involve the slave trade.

“Do you have food?” she asks. “Will you be alright? The barges are yours; do whatever you want with them.”

The man who speaks up... looks a little like Keris. Not a lot. But his skin is only a bit lighter and he has the same grey eyes - or at least one of them. The other is swollen shut with an impressive black eye. “Uh. They were feeding us slops, so they must have food onboard somewhere,” he says.

“The G-Guild’ll kill us,” stammers a woman. “This’s stolen Guild ships, that’s how they’ll see it. And I can’t sail a ship!”

“Where are we?” the man with the bruised eye asks Keris. “We’ve been on the river a week or so.”

Keris pauses. “... huh,” she mutters. “Nice to be dealing with people who talk the same language as me for once.” She clears her throat. “You’re just east of the Vakotan badlands - a bit north of Taira. Maybe a day’s sail, I’d guess? Eat and get out of here - if you’re scared to use the boats; scuttle them and move on foot - stay together. I can’t stay with you to help. I’m sorry.”

“Are... are you with Red Valah?” the man asks.  Keris cocks her head inquisitively. 

“No,” she replies shortly, “but I think you should tell me all about them if what I did here makes you think I am.”

“She’s... she’s got the dragon’s blood, or so they say. But she’s not a fancy lady or one of those outsiders,” the man says. “They say she’s building an army and she’s going to free all slaves. When the naibs find that their slave convoys are freed or their supplies are raided, they increase the bounty on her head.”

Absorbing this, Keris considers it for a moment before nodding slowly. “Sounds like a woman I should meet, then,” she says. “But later. Unless any of you need urgent healing, I’ve got to go. Stay safe, and good luck.”

The ones here don’t seem to, and Keris is in a hurry. She leaves them, and heads back to Kuha, who’s sitting by the river side, dangling her feet from a rock while Rounen spit-roasts some little lizards he found on wooden skewers.

“Did it go well, Kerishyra?” Kuha asks her.

“It went well,” Keris confirms. “The slaves are free, the slavers are dead or fleeing. And I found out about a woman I may need to talk to later. But later is later, and for now... oh, are those saffron-dusted? Gimme.”

Several lizards disappear into Keris’s hair with crunching noises.

“Mmm. Yes, later is later, and for now we move. We’re almost there now - Eshtock is somewhere in the north Tairan mountains.”

They set off again, and Keris’ head is filled with Rathan’s whining.

When she wearily takes a look, he’s... pretty bruised. That is to say, he makes having a broken nose, a split lip, and nasty bruises all over his torso - not to mention choke-marks on his neck - look pretty.

“Mama,” he mewls pitifully. “Look what they did? Why didn’t you stop them?”

“Oh, baby!” Keris gasps, horrified. “They hurt you so badly! Let me help, come here...”

Some intensive pampering takes place as Keris resets his nose and soothes his various hurts, then cuddles him as much as he’ll let her.

“I didn’t realise they were beating you up so much, sweetheart,” she says mournfully. “I’m sorry. And I had to deal with the slavers, so I couldn’t just drop into meditation on the spot. Tell you what; once this assassination is done and we can start looking for Baisha properly, I’ll summon you out into the world. That way your siblings won’t be able to hurt you, _and_ you can help me deliver some justice. How does that sound?”

“But how are you going to _punish_ them?” Rathan wants to know, hugging Keris tight. There’s a little bit of her which... which wishes this was Rat - but she forces it down. “I don’t hurt them like that!”

“No, you don’t - and we should really get you some armour that’s as pretty as you are, so that they can’t hurt you like that,” she adds in a moment of distraction. “Or maybe a special weapon. But, mm. Who hurt you more? Vali was the one who broke your nose, wasn’t he?”

“Mmm hmm,” Rathan says sadly. “He punches really hard. He did the hitting. Calesco held me down so he could punch me and I couldn’t jump away.”

“That is very mean of her,” Keris frowns. “Alright, well. Vali is a bit hard to punish because he’s so contrary - I won’t be able to _make_ him do anything or he’ll just smash his way out. Maybe we could set things up so you could tell a bunch of his people how mean he is - and then they might leave his lands to come and live under you; which is something he can’t just punch.”

She strokes his hair gently, a fond smile overtaking her face at how tall he is now. “Your horns are getting bigger,” she adds. “They’re very pretty. All coral-y under the ice-velvet.”

Rathan makes a sad sound, and snuggles up to Keris further. The door to his throne room enters, and a wave-cherub comes in. She - and this is definitely a girl because she’s wearing a coral-red dress that looks like it was deliberately copied from Keris’ favourite garment - catches Keris’ eye, and squeaks. She’s tall for a wave-cherub, and her waterfall hair is long. She might even be getting some curves, although actually looking close Keris suspects that she’s stuffed seaweed down her front.

Turning at the noise, Rathan cheers up slightly. “Oula,” he says. “Calesco and Vali picked on me and broke my nose, but Mama made it right.”

The wave-cherub immediately stiffens up, holding onto her coral spear tightly. “Is it war against Vali?” she asks immediately. “Oh! Lord Rathan! Since Princess Haneyl is away, maybe we can send a force around through her land because she’s not looking and hit Calesco from the other side. We can distract Zanara with sweeties so they don’t notice!”

Rathan gives this serious thought.

“No making war on your siblings’ lands while they’re away, or they’re allowed to do the same to you,” Keris says quickly. “If you want to send an army through Haneyl’s lands, it needs to not damage anything in them. If you start fighting each other by taking advantage of being out in Creation with me, it’ll turn into an endless hellish grudge match.”

She lets that sink in for a moment before continuing. “And who’s this? Rathan, would you like to introduce me to your friend?”

“I wouldn’t be making war, I’d just be sneak-attacking Calesco from Haneyl’s side so actually that’s less war since I’m not having to have Haneyl victimise me,” Rathan grumbles. He perks up. “This is Oula! She’s my friend!”

“You showed me how to use a spear,” Oula says. Her voice is very sweet-sounding and high-pitched. She sounds like a small animal, although she holds the spear like she actually knows what to do with it.

“She’s one of my duchesses!” Rathan says proudly. “That means she’s a war leader. And a general. She’s really good at it, for all that she’s a girl.”

Keris takes a moment to approve of Oula’s stance, and thinks back to what she might mean. Ah, of course. The night Vali was born. There were lots of wave-cherubs up on the moon with Dulmea, and... yes, at least a few of them had been watching how she’d held her Lance.

In fact, she vaguely remembers almost impaling one of them in her jitteriness. She... might have had the same sort of sea-shell-tined head as Oula? Keris hadn’t really been paying attention.

“I’m glad you’re putting your skills to good use, then,” she says out loud. “Rathan, I just wanted to make sure you knew - if you do any damage to Haneyl’s lands while she’s not there to defend them; that’ll be breaking the rules. You can move through as long as you’re careful about it like you’d be if you were doing it during an alliance with her - or like you’d want her to be if it were the other way around.”

“I don’t care about Hanny,” Rathan protests. “She’s never held me down so someone can break my nose!”

“Mmm.” Keris frowns. “I might confine Calesco to her cave for a while for that. She could stand to be a bit more compassionate towards you, couldn’t she?”

“She’s just mean,” Rathan says firmly.

Keris kisses him on the forehead instead of answering. “Are you feeling better? I’ll sort this out properly when we stop to sleep, but for now I need to go back out and get the rest of the way to Eshtock.”

“Yeah! I’ll be planning war with Oula!” he says. “Right?”

“Can I talk to you, my lady? Outside?” Oula asks Keris. “Before you go?”

Keris inclines her head and leads the way outside, summoning her Lance as she goes to match Oula’s coral spear and carrying it with habitual ease.

“Um.” Insofar as Keris can tell from a wave-cherub, Oula appears to be blushing. “What can you tell me about being pretty?” she asks, all in a rush. “I got a dress like yours but what else? And you’re the most beautiful girl in all the world so you have to know how to do it so he... so a boy will look at you.”

“... oh, honey.” Keris laughs softly after a moment of surprised blinking. She grins, amused and a little charmed by the compliment, and sits down. “You like Rathan, then? And you want him to notice you, but not just as a war leader and a duchess and a friend. You want him to notice you as a _girl_.”

((d’awww teenage crush so cute))

She nods, a girl clearly confused.

“Mmm,” Keris hums. “Well, you’re definitely doing well already. He likes you and trusts you, and you’re important to him - that’s a really good start. That’s how me and his... his father got started, in fact.” She smiles wistfully, looking into the middle distance for a moment before shaking her head and sizing Oula up. With her height, a better look at the lines of her face and the things she’s saying... Keris’s impression is of a girl about the age she was when Rat disappeared. Maybe a year or two younger, since Oula is better fed. She’s growing up - and Keris wonders if maybe she’s not the only kerub who’s doing so.

“If you want my advice?” she says, “Being pretty is good, but love is best of all. If you love someone, you’ll look at them no matter what they’re wearing. If you can be brave enough to tell him that you like him, I think he’ll take it really well. But it’s easier to be brave like that when you know you look pretty, isn’t it? Lip paint and earrings can be like armour. So I’ll share a few tips on how to look good when I come back tonight.”

Oula nods, and leans in to give Keris a hug that leaves her feeling rather damp. “Thank you thank you thank you,” she says squeakily, then skips back into Rathan’s room.

Keris is smiling as she comes back to reality. And it’s not too much longer until they can see the lights of Terema in the distance.

Terema is the gateway to Taira, according to the documents Orange Blossom gave Keris. It’s where the shahs of Taira enforced their tariffs on river trade downstream. It’s currently in the hands of the Shabanu, and it’s how she can afford the war. Now the city is also where mercenaries drawn to Taira enter the country. It’s a mixture of a mass hiring place, a trading port, and a giant mass of bars, brothels, and other places that people who’ve seen too much of the Tairan civil war spend their money to try to forget.

Keris stops them a fair ways out from the city and settles them down to camp for the night. She has a couple of things to get done, and the first is Kuha.

“We need to be able to blend in,” she says straightforwardly. “One thing I can do do to help with that is change your skin colour and tweak your face a bit so you can pass as a native, and make you a bit taller. That means a bit heavier as well, but you’ll still be able to fly on Cissidy, and I’ll undo it all as soon as we’re done in this region. Will you let me do this?”

“Like the women who didn’t become twig children?” Kuha asks, her accent thickening out of excitement. “That tall?”  Keris grins, relieved at how well Kuha seems to be taking a brief respite from flying.

“If you want. Are you so eager to be bigger than me?”

Kuha looks shocked for a moment, then grins. “Of course!” Her expression sours. “But not just that. I just... I always wanted to know what it would have been like to be as tall as my mother.”

Keris nods. “Then let’s see about finding out. This won’t hurt; but it’ll feel very strange and take a while. Lie down and hold still.”

((Yeah, so Keris is going to push her up to the size of an adult woman on the short side and disguise her as Tairan - or at least the bits of her that people will see, which is mostly just her face and her hands. Chimeric Corpus Cultivation for a disguise roll, then. Which is Diff... 6, by the rules. Disguise roll is Diff 1 +1 {notably taller} +1 {different ethnicity}, doubled for CCC.))  
((... Cog+Occult? Cog+Larceny?))  
((Yeah, it’s a surgery roll, so Occult-based.))  
((3+5+8 Kimmy ExD {great artist, keep secrets by any means necessary}+2 stunt=18. 9 sux. Don’t mind Keris, she’s just going around being a better medic than most fully equipped hospital doctors could ever hope to be while carrying out improvised surgery in the middle of the Vakotan badlands with no tools.))

Happily, Keris has a convenient example of the Tairan ethnicity available to draw samples from; namely herself. Her hair-tendrils tease bits of her own skin into Kuha’s and encourage the colour to spread, and her root-fingers rearrange subtle elements in the bones of Kuha’s face and the set of her eyes and jaw. She makes very sure to memorise how everything was before her changes so that she can put it back - and the taste that her alterations leave behind on Kuha’s flesh will be useful reminders if she forgets.

Kuha doesn’t make things any easier by squirming as Keris reshapes her flesh. It tickles, she says. Still, it’s done in maybe half an hour, and Kuha stands up - and up, and up. She can rest her chin on Keris’ head, and does so to prove it.

Squatting down by water, she pats her face, and examines it under the light of Rounen’s burning torch. “My eyes are funny shaped,” she says. “But you left the colour the same green, hee!” Stretching up, she leaps and hangs from a tree branch. “I can do this!” she says gleefully. “Kerishyra, I love it when you change my body! I love you for this and for everything you’ve given me and how I would be dead if it was not for you.” She drops down and nudges Keris in the ribs. “Now let’s go get some food and maybe find some pretty boys and girls, eh?”

Keris rolls her eyes in exasperation, but can’t suppress a smile at how happy Kuha is. “You can find pretty boys and girls,” she says. “I need to scope out the city for the Lookshy forces.” She stretches, wringing her fingers back into their proper shape. “And also sort out the children. Urgh. Alright, food, yes. Then we can find you someone to spend the night with, and I can start getting this job over and done with.”

Kuha shakes her head. “The sky-view... the map, that is, it showed that the place we are looking for is in-land. Ah! Are you looking if any of these coin-hire soldiers have seen Lookshyians recently?”

“That’s the plan.” Keris grins. “Well-guessed. Yeah, if there are Lookshyian soldiers here, I’m willing to bet they’ll want booze, gambling, whores and all the other dirty luxuries of the big city. Terema is the best bet for where they’ll get them, and I hear everything. I want confirmation from somewhere other than Orange Blossom before I go chasing any rats down holes.”

The signs of the Shabanu’s reconquest of Terema are still evident in the city. Her flag flies aggressively over the heights, but the walls are damaged and broken in many places, or crudely patched up with different coloured stone. That doesn’t matter, though - the mercenary markets of Terema spill out from the broken walls, and are almost a town in their own right. It’s past midnight, but the place is still loud and active. Countless tea-houses and bars pack the impromptu, muddy streets between the endless array of slophouses, food-courts, hotels, tents of ill-repute, and recruiting stations.

As a Nexan girl, Keris finds that reassuring. Even if it is a bit too loud.

There are mercenaries from all over the Scavenger Lands here, and that means the food is like that, too. Keris finds a place that does Nexan food, and settles down with Kuha for a meal of long grained rice, topped with a spicy vegetable sauce. Kuha then strikes it up with the teenage waiter, who apparently finds Kuha’s accent attractive - as well as the fact that she prods Keris into leaving a generous tip.

Well, she’s found her entertainment for the night. Now Keris has people to track down.

((Declare method, whether she’s got money for bribes or is acquiring it, etc, and declare stunt - then I’ll tell you what to roll))  
((Using stolen money to hire various people from brothels for a private room and give _them_ a peak-human massage done with the eye of a genius medic who can pinpoint pulled muscles and knots and stiffness and the like, in return for lots and lots of gossip.))  
((Okay, one on one stuff - but not exactly quick. Running off Presence + Per, say, six hours to try to gather info.))  
((Not quick, but pretty comprehensive. Brothels get all the gossip, and this way they’re friendly and eager to share all of it.  
3+5+3 Cerulean Paramour+2 stunt+4 Kimmy ExSux {endlessly giving, patronage and kindness are real}=13. 6+4=10 sux.))

Absently reviewing the list that Kuha and Rounen have been working on - ah, she _has_ worked out that Keris could make her a man for a week or so if she wanted - Keris meanders through the blue-lights district and acquires a number of beltpurses, moneybags and pieces of jewellery. Then, stepping into a shadow for a moment to become a black-haired, non-pregnant male version of herself, she starts looking for rumours in earnest. She keeps an ear out for any trace of a Lookshy accent or any hint of people talking about them, and she mingles with the workers in the various brothels. Most of them are happy to talk to someone who’s willing to give them twenty minutes or so spent off their feet getting a sinfully good massage and a decent tip in return for gossip, rumour and hearsay.

Keris... knows how this kind of thing goes. She wasn’t ever like them - she wasn’t! - but her... her friends were and a lot of men like to chat and complain about their officers - or their bosses or their wife - when you get a little more upclass. And when it comes down to it, Keris is paying.

“Yes,” the most useful lead she finds produces. “Ah, yes, I’ve seen them. Funny looking man, with a grey tattoo on one shoulder and a big scar down his chest. Complaining about how he’s been in the field for two years and he’s spent nearly a year up in the mountains and how he’s sure he’s getting a cough because of the cold and damp.”

((Honestly, I’d imagine the 13-dice massages are as responsible for them sharing as the pay. Possibly more so, in fact, because the massage is probably worth a lot more than the fee, and for good reason. : P))

Keris nods thoughtfully, leaves the man an appreciative tip and retraces her steps to track down Kuha.

Who... is still busy. Or possibly has woken up after several hours of sleep and rebusied herself. Either way, Keris does not want to know. She retires to the end of the road, finds a convenient rooftop to perch on, and sinks into meditation to deal with the fallout her childrens’ latest fight.

Hopefully by the time she’s finished, Kuha will be done. And then...

Then, Eshtock.


	2. Chapter 2

The sounds of Terema wash over Keris as she ponders what to do next. From the map, the capital is 300 miles south of here, but that’s not what she’s interested in. Somewhere to the west, within 400 miles or so, is the place she’s looking for - if her map from Orange Blossom is correct, at least.

She has a few hours to kill until Kuha... un-busies herself. She was considering talking to her children, or she could go looking for anything else in Terema. Or find her own entertainment here.

She wanders for a bit. After all her time away from familiar Nexus - in Hell, in Matasque, in the Northeast, in the Southwest - it’s strange to be in the land of her origins. Keris is used by now to language barriers - and sure, perhaps now she slips past them instead of struggling through with hard-earned trilingualism, but hearing people speaking _Rivertongue_ around her is...

... she’s not sure what it is. Not unsettling or uncomfortable, but hearing strains of the accents that Sasi helped her remember from her earliest years throws _something_ in her off-balance. Shaken from her usual poise, Keris reverts to habit and slinks through the streets on instinct; lifting wallets and filching from stalls. She dips past the river and pilfers from a couple of boats, and makes two or three houses a little less wealthy than they were. Stealing is comfortable. It’s something she knows; something that’s more or less the same wherever she goes.

She tries not to think about how, if Terema throws her to this extent, Baisha will no doubt be worse.

((Reaction + Subterfuge to see how well her plundering goes - and how much of the local currency she acquires, because she is rather lacking in money that’s spendable here))  
((5+5+3 Light-Fingered Larcenist+2 stunt+10 Adorjani ExD because apparently Keris is just reflexively Excellency-boosting now. Enhancing with Theft As Release on anything in the Res 4-5 range that she happens to come across. 25 dice... maaan, only 8 successes. Poor form. Guess she’s too distracted.))

She must have been distracted. That’s the only reason she has for how she nearly got caught inside the guarded headquarters of a mercenary company pitched out here in Terema. Plus, the entire camp was noisy and it was hard to hear specific light footsteps coming closer when there was constantly people tramping around heavily outside. There was very nearly an awkward moment as she pilfered a month’s pay.

Well, it’s not like she actually got caught. She leapt up into the rafters and spread out her hair, holding her up there - and let the mercenary captain in the tarnished armour withdraw money from the strongbox. He left, none the wiser of what had been a metre or so above his head.

And then she hefted the very heavy strongbox - which would have taken two adult men to lift - in her hair, and made her way back out.

Several streets away, she put down her heavy load, and inspected the contents of what she’d stolen. She guessed it was a month’s pay for that mercenary company. Perhaps two or three silver talent’s worth, though it was in the form of a only a few bars and most of it was smaller amounts of currency in sorted bags. Still, more than enough to keep her comfortable.

Keris happily retires to a rooftop and spends the next twenty minutes or so counting out her newfound wealth, stacking the coins into successive piles and gauging the purity and quality of the metal with a few discerning nibbles. Haneyl, she thinks, would be squealing with gleeful greed at this - and feels a pang of loneliness at the absence of her daughter from the back of her mind.

The sadness passes quickly, though. With a grin, Keris notes that the coinage here is widely varied. There are a lot of Tairan coins, and most of the old ones are impressively pure silver. They must have silver mines here. However, the more recent ones, the ones with a woman’s head on it, are heavily adulterated with lead or nickel and the edges have often been shaved on the older ones.

Keris sucks in air between her teeth. It’s... it’s _unethical_ to adulterate coinage like that! It means money she steals is worth less!

But they’re far from the only coins here. There’s a lot of Nexan dinars, there’s some Realm currency - and they’re in a bag on their own - and there’s coins from other nations she doesn’t recognise. There’s a lot of trade going through this place if the coins are this diverse.

Plus, this is a mercenary company’s money. A good amount of it is probably plunder from other people, Keris thinks.

((Oh Keris. Staunchly against watering down the currency with forgeries. It means her stolen money isn’t as good.))  
((#ethicallarceny))

She stashes it with Dulmea in the vaults of her Domain and swings into motion again. This time her destination is simple: she beelines for the river and slips silently under the water; coming to rest at its bottom in a crosslegged meditative pose.

Eshtock, then.

“So, I’ve confirmed what Orange Blossom told me,” she says inwardly. “Lookshy’s here in some force, digging up a city in the mountains. I need the commander dead and Thorns blamed for it. To kill him I can disguise myself as a Dead Exalt; that won’t be too hard, but if there’s a way for me to get my hands on a fair chunk of the treasure there; I want it.”

A thought occurs to her, and she hums. “Actually, Rathan? You helped me keep the Althing from finding out I’d summoned you all, didn’t you? Do you think you could help me with this cover-up as well?”

“Hmm.” Rathan sounds very clinical and Rat-like here. “I dunno, Mama. Dragonblooded like the scary fire lady are scary and mean. And they found you before, so I dunno what other powers they have!”

“Yeah, but that was when we were pretending to be a mortal - and working on their home ground to boot,” Keris counters. “This time we _want_ them to think it was an Anathema who turned up and killed their boss. We just want to fool them on which kind.”

“Yes, but I heard that Dragonblooded monks _kill_ demon lords, mama!” Rathan says, sounding rather more worried. “And my horrible sisters beat me up all the time so... I’m not very strong.” His voice cracks and he sounds like he’s going to cry.

“ _I’m_ strong,” Keris says, and puts as much reassurance behind it as she can. “Remember how easily I beat up that chaos prince on Shuu Mua? That was as strong as a demon lord, and it didn’t even put up a fight. Or the hungry giant king up in the Northeast! That was as strong as Alveua - _and_ better at fighting! It didn’t even scratch me. Dragonblooded have to work really hard and team up against things like that, but I can do it solo - and I’ll keep you inside me while we’re on this mission, so that you’ll be safe. I just need your help in working out how to be clever and trick them. I don’t know anyone who’s as good at working _people_ as you - except maybe Sasi, and you know she thought you had a lot of promise when she met you at Calibration.”

((Per + Pres))  
((Motherly Reassurance Prana! Laying it on thick with the flattery - 3+5+2 stunt+1 Spirit-Charming Style+4 Kimmy ExD=15.  
... holy shit so many tens. 16 successes. Hah. Hahaha. What the actual.  
**10 10 10 10 9 8 8 8 7 7 7 7** 5 2 1  
Wow.))  
((lol, you rolled well enough that this laid a Compulsion on him to try to get braver and increase his Valour. :V ))  
((D’awww))  
((... that may wind up biting me in the ass))

Rathan inhales a deep wobbly breath. “Okay!” he says, trying to sound as bright as possible. “I... I can do this. I can be strong. Okay, mama. What do you want me to do?”

“We want them to blame Thorns,” Keris says firmly; rolling with the momentum of the conversation. “And you’re super-good at guilt and innocence, aren’t you? Honestly, this is barely even lying, because Thorns _are_ horrible people, and they probably _are_ working against Lookshy. Against everything alive. So let’s think about ways we might set things up to point a finger at Thorns, shall we?”

Rathan grins. Keris has sunk deep enough into meditation that she can see him, and the blackness of the sky squirms behind the red halo of moon light surrounding him. “Okay. Come on, mama. I can make space in my war room for you.”

It’s a productive few hours in Rathan’s room, and Keris also uses the time to rest her aching brain. But all too soon, the sun is rising, dim light streaming down through the river water.

Despite the headache, she’s grinning as she leaves the river and wrings her hair dry - some of the ideas they came up with were deliciously wicked, and she can’t wait to put them into practice. But she won’t be able to do that until she gets to Eshtock, and for that she needs to pick up Kuha and make tracks towards the mountains. Kuha is asleep next to her pollen-streaked playmate when Keris finds her, but she wakes easily and dresses and sneaks out.

“He wasn’t much good,” she tells Keris breezily over breakfast. “He had no idea what to do with his hands. He certainly wasn’t a neomah. So, what now, Kerishyra?”

Keris raises an eyebrow at her. “With standards set by neomah, you’ll have trouble finding a mortal who _will_ please you,” she says. “Well, now we’ve confirmed Lookshy’s here, and I’ve nicked us some funds...”

She lets a silver Guild dinar spin across her fingers before flicking it back into her hair with a grin. “Now it’s time to head to our goal here. We’re off up into the mountains, and you’re going to do some nighttime surveying while I investigate the local shadowlands.”

Kuha gives her a thumbs up. “So let’s grab the supplies from the markets here and head out, if you’ve come into cash,” she says.

Keris hits the markets like a born haggler. These people might think they’re worldly traders, but Keris grew up around _Little Market_. No matter how much trade comes through Terema, it’s strictly small time compared to the queen of trade cities that is Nexus. And when the fact that she knows the exact value of the coins she’s paying with and how to apply each of the mingled currencies to best effect... well, she’s pretty sure Rat would be giving her an approving nod if he were here.

There’s more than enough small parties of mercenary scouts passing through this town that there are people literally specialising in selling equipment and supplies for small groups going up into the mountains. In less than half an hour, Keris has two full sets of gear suitable for people heading up into the mountains when there might be a risk of snow - the sellers were telling the truth when they made that out as a big deal - and two weeks of trail rations for two people.

She also finds out that while there didn’t use to be shadowlands in northern Taira, the civil war has spawned several. Some are small, from massacred villages, while there’s apparently a river up in the mountains where an entire valley has become polluted by death and healthy people don’t go. Urgh. She isn’t looking forward to this. But hey, an invasion by the undead will be an excellent cover to lend some authenticity to her fake Thorns attack. Maybe she can lure some hungry ghosts into the city. Or find something big and horrible, like the Greater Dead thing she’d killed in An Teng, and chase it up out of the Underworld into the Lookshyian camp. That’d be a pretty good distraction for her to assassinate her target in the chaos.

Kuha is waiting for her on the outskirts of town, hand on the Malfean sabre she’s taken to wearing, and glaring daggers at a group of men on the other side of the tent-street. “Ready to get out of here?” she says, voice low and intense. “I don’t know how much longer I can stop myself from gutting those fucks.”

((Rolling 4-dot Principle towards Kuha, do dee doo... 2 successes, pom pe pom...))

Keris’s eyes narrow dangerously. “They were bothering you?” she asks. “How?”

“They were treating me like some of the men treated the unmarried women.” Kuha is showing her teeth in an adrenaline snarl. “I was jealous of the women back then. Now that happened to me, I hate it. I think that one with the blue hair would look better with his guts around his ankles.”

Keris smiles to match her. She can hear what they’re saying about Kuha - and about Keris herself, now that she’s joined her friend. They don’t seem to be able to tell a murderous snarl apart from a flirtatious smile - that, or they just don’t care.

((Are they speaking in Lookshyian accents, btw?))  
((Nah, they’re Scavenger Lands mercenary scum.))  
((Keris saw the like a lot in Nexus, blowing off steam on Nexan vices like booze, girls, boys and drugs.))

“No, I don’t think so,” she says lightly. “I think he’d look better on his knees, begging you to forgive him in front of all of his friends. What do you think?”

“That would be a good second,” Kuha says.

“She’s about as feral as you were when I met you,” Dulmea says, vaguely disgusted. “No wonder you like her.”

“I know, right?” thinks Keris happily, already crossing the street. “She’s got good instincts. And room to mature.”

Her smile is genuinely cheerful as she comes up on the group, and the pleased pride rolling off her probably makes it even more surprising when she bounces up to Blue-Hair, drops him to his knees with a flicker-quick hook kick and knees him in the throat.

“You were being very rude to my friend here,” she says pleasantly as he gags, grinning with all her teeth at his friends while they consider whether or not to get involved. Kuha, coming up behind her, has a similar expression. “She didn’t like that. I think maybe you should grovel and apologise. On your belly. Like a worm.”

There’s fear and hatred on the expressions of the onlookers, but also enough wariness that she can see right through them. They want to take her down. They want to show this uppity bitch who just kneed their friend in the throat what for. But they’ve seen too much shit to want to mess with a woman who can do that.

And when the man stops vomiting and gasping so much, and sees his friends aren’t coming to help him... well, he cracks.

“I’m sorry, missus,” he says, curled up in a ball, his voice a breathy whisper. “Sorry for that. Weren’t no offence meant.”

Keris turns to Kuha indulgently. “Do you think he’s sorry enough? I’d say he’s learned his lesson.”

Kuha tilts her head, considering it. Then she steps in and delivers a kick to his back.

“I guess this _guruna punda_ shitbag has,” she says. “Now.”

She swaggers as she heads off behind Keris, hand still on her sabre.

“Well, that was a good start to the morning,” she tells Keris once they’re some way away. “Let’s get some distance away and mount up, or are you going to carry me?”

“We’ll mount up,” Keris decides. “You’re all... urgh. Gigantic. Too big for poor little me to carry.” She mock-glares up at Kuha’s new height. “You’re enjoying being up there, I can tell.”

Kuha cringes slightly, and takes some of the supplies off Keris. “You should have told me you needed help, Kerishyra,” she says. “I’m not a stick-child - I can carry my own burdens like an adult.”

“Kuha,” Keris says gently. “I was joking. It’s fine. But while we’re walking; we can talk plans. I have the rough location of Eshtock from Orange Blossom, but I want a night surveillance before I start snooping - and I’d also be a lot happier knowing for sure that the Lookshyians don’t have reserve forces camped in any nearby valleys.”

She pauses for a moment. “Come to think of it, I’d be a lot happier knowing nobody else does, either. I really don’t want another Nexus. Uh,” she adds at Kuha’s curious look, “a while before I met you; Sasi and I were running a mission there that ran into someone else’s plan. We didn’t know about them, I don’t think they knew about us... end result; I had to get my hostage out ahead of Council forces and half the city was on fire when I left. Eshtock is a big, juicy prize - and I doubt the locals are happy about Lookshy swooping in to grab it. If the Shahbanu is moving forces in to take it off them or someone else has a scheme in the works; I wanna know about it _before_ we walk into the middle to try and pull off an assassination.”

Kuha nods. “I looked at your maps, Kerishyra,” she says. “Can you bring them out again?”

Keris recovers them for her, and Kuha nods.

“This is the place,” she says, jabbing her finger at the place marked in Orange Blossom’s neat handwriting. “Look. This place, Saha - it is the near-place for the Eshtock place. It is lower in the river - at the entrance to the valleys that lead up to it. I think that might be a good operational base, where we can rest our owls. Or... ah, rather our selves.”

“Good plan,” Keris agrees. “Now remember; this is a Lookshyian force. They’ll have Dragonblooded. Be careful and stay high and out of sight - we don’t want to tip them off that we’re here.”

“I think we should first see if we can get any clues to where the Lookshyians are from the Saha place,” Kuha says. “If they do not have owls, they might be using the river to get upstream, yes? They might have passed through there.”

“They’ll be in Eshtock,” sneers Keris, “pillaging the place. Mm. But you’re right, they must have a supply line, and a way in and out. I just hope they don’t have any sorcerers...”

She bites a hair tendril and chews thoughtfully. “Okay, if you see any evidence of demons or elementals that look bound? You head straight back to me and report - a sorcerer is a big complication. We’ll get to Saha, rest up, find their tracks and make sure we’re not dealing with any nasty surprises before moving in on the city itself. We’re far enough to mount up now, so... Cissidy!”

The land rises continuously upwards heading west. In fact, the Grey River is basically one huge drainage basin for the area, which explains why it’s one of the great rivers of Creation. All the water that falls on these uplands eventually makes its way down into it.

The hilly country is littered with microclimes. One valley is lush and green, and then only twenty miles away another is in the rain shadow of a mountain and is arid in comparison. This is a patchwork landscape, dividing the savannahs and uplands of the Vakotan lands from the southern jungles of southern Taira.

They stop for lunch on an old broken First Age dam, the honey-coloured stone broken and incomplete. Then they continue on. By the time it’s mid-afternoon, they’re over a broad-swampy valley.

“Look,” Kuha calls out. “This is the Ros Marsh on the map, I think. Saha is in the Marsh.”

“Marshlands, _wonderful_ ,” says Keris, with feeling. Rounen seems almost as pleased. “No, seriously, this is great. I can make us feel right at home here. Rounen, no fires unless they’re very, very well concealed. We’re going to be spotting people that way; we don’t want them spotting us. Cissidy, take us down.”

Once they’re rather closer to ground level, Keris continues. “Okay, another big question I want answered: how well-equipped is this force? Hopefully mostly just mortals, but answering it for sure is going to need direct observation, so I think it’ll be a Gale’s job. I’ll be busy with the local Underworld and you’ll be scouting - and anyway, I’m more likely to recognise what they have if I see it myself. Sort of. First we settle down and break camp, though.”

There’s an old road built up on stacked rocks that rises as a causeway above the marsh, and there’s signs of recent repair on it. The causeway has a caravan making its way along it, travelling heavy. Keris also notes that there are patrols of horse riders on it - they’re local Tairans, wearing warm padded buff jackets and cloth-wrapped bronze helmets. Their horses breaths steam in the cold.

In the winter, this whole marsh is probably frozen over. Kuha’s already wearing the winter-travelling clothes Keris bought from the market in Terema.

Dipping down, Keris checks a signpost. This causeway does lead to Saha - it’s about fifteen miles away from here. She bades them travel ten more before setting down entirely and dismounting. Their final approach will be on foot, and quieter than an eight-legged demon horse. Rounen proves to have a natural knack for marshland navigation, and takes point as they finish the final leg of the trek.

“This is an awfully boring marsh, mum,” he observes, casually picking his way through a path that runs alongside the road, on drier hillocks of earth. “Nothing’s even trying to eat us, ‘part from the bugs. And they’re not _proper_ bugs. I don’t trust the trees, though. They’re probably planning something. Those green leaves look dangerous. They’re probably on fire on the inside.”

“As long as you don’t set them on fire from the _outside_ , they can stay like that,” Keris informs him. “And I’m perfectly happy to not be making my way through Haneyl’s Swamp right now. That would slow us down a lot more. And- urgh!” She glares down at her belly; currently wrapped in Amulet-made fur since the clothes she bought for herself didn’t quite fit. “You two! Stop squirming! And kicking! And... okay, fine, you can keep hugging, but not if you’re going to stomp all over my organs as you do!” Gathering two handfuls of hair, she tugs at it in frustration. “I cannot _wait_ for them to be _out_ , argh. Three more months. Three more months. Twelve more weeks. Rrrgh. I can see why Sasi was half-tempted to shortcut the whole thing and cut Aiko out early.”

Saha comes into sight. The walled town is surrounded on all sides by fresher-flowing water that runs through carefully maintained channels, and is located on raised, drier ground.

The architecture is largely wooden, though the temples and the citadel are built of the stone from the ancient Shogunate village which was located here. Keris sees them poking over the top of the walls. There are more ruins visible in the Ros Marsh, half-sunk into the wet ground.

They’re approaching from the east, so Keris can see that the eastern walls are chipped, damaged and battle-worn. The damage is worn away, though - several years old. The wall looks like it was broken, but there’s a fresh stone curtain wall raised from the ground itself. Keris can see the patchwork integration required to merge the new smooth wall with the old damaged one.

“They’re worried about the Dead,” she comments. “Good, I can get a lead on which valleys to explore with what’s left of today, and we can start work tomorrow.”

As they approach the gate, Keris can hear two of the guards up on top playing cards. That’s not an unfamiliar sound - not at all. But one of their accents is familiar - and it’s not the broad, slightly slurred accent that seems to be the local one. That’s not familiar.

No, one of the women up there is Lookshyian.

“Hells,” she hisses. “Back, back, back into the marsh, back back back.”

She listens harder from under cover and swears again. “Plague-rot. One of those guards on the wall is Lookshyian. If this place is like Agenete... hang on, here comes someone. Let’s see if they ask for papers.”

Keris is in luck. The four riders who approach don’t seem to be local - in fact, two of them seem to be hired Harbourhead mercenary bodyguards, from their chatter - but all the people at the gate do is ask their purpose... and when they say they’re looking to stop over and resupply while continuing west to Malra, they’re let through. Notably, the people asking the questions at the gate are locals. The Lookshyian woman - and there only seems to be one - isn’t on the ground.

“... alright,” says Keris. “We’re heading west. You’re accompanying me as a bodyguard. Let me do the talking. Let’s go.”

The guards at the gate are huddled around a fire, leaning on their spears. They seem to play a quick game of rock-paper-scissors to see who has to leave the warmth to talk to the newcomer.

“What’s your purpose here?” asks the man who loses. He’s paler than Keris, and has a hare lip.

Keris shivers uncomfortably for effect, wrapping her arms around herself. “M-my bodyguard and I are travelling west,” she says, looking pitiful and cold. “We’re here to stay a few days and rest before continuing on.”

“On foot?” he asks in mild surprise. “I’m surprised you weren’t bitten to death by the damn mossies.”

“We almost were,” Keris grumbles. “And if we can find a drawn cart here, that’s how we’ll be c-continuing. Now please? I’m sure you’re as eager to get back where it’s warm as we are.” Kuha, either playing up the bodyguard act or out of genuine concern, pulls off her outermost layer and settles it around Keris’s shoulders.

“Uh...” The man seems nagged by his better nature. “Listen, my wife’s cousin runs a hostel for the travellers we get passing through here - the Lemon Tree. If you tell them Mouhan sent you, you’ll get a better rate.”

“Thank you,” Keris says gratefully, squeezing his hand in thanks. “Thank you so much; we will.” Once past the gate, she takes a look around before going to the hostel. And what she finds from asking around comes as an unpleasant surprise.

From what she hears, the Bhama family rules Saha, and the current leader is Naib Yose Bharma. He is a young man, promoted too soon by the death of his father - the man she’s asking says, spitting on the ground - and he is determined to stay out of the civil war. That’s why the man thinks he made a deal with those damn Lookshyians in the east district.

“The what?” Keris asks.

The eastern quarter of the town was sacked five years ago, the man expands, and much of the section of the town is still burned out. The Lookshyian expeditionary force has occupied it and built a sub-fort within the district, their sorcerer raising a stone fortress there where no one else is allowed.

“It was a creepifying thing,” the man says, shivering. “The earth shook and then this stone just came up out of the ground. Same thing they did to the broken wall.”

Keris reacts with appropriate awe and unease, trading a significant glance with Kuha as soon as they’re alone again.

“So,” she whispers. “They have a sorcerer. And a permanent presence in the town. I guess we know how they got their foothold in the region. I... I vote we stay on the western side of town.”

“Then I vote what you vote,” Kuha says loyally and sycophantically.

The hostel is... not good, but at least there’s a room for Keris and Kuha. There were bedbugs in the beds, at least until Keris’s hair descended and made the place fit for sleeping in.

Keris leaves Kuha to get some food and warm herself up - because the other woman was really suffering in the marsh, much more than Keris was - and then she goes looking around for rumours of the Dead.

She’s an expecting mother. She’s travelling, with only one bodyguard. It’s natural that she’s nervous, and looking for reassurance on whether this region is safe, what with... with all the Dead that she’s heard are around. The town has running water around its walls! What must that say about the safety of those who travel outside it? Who knows where the redoubts of the Underworld are? Keris would certainly like to, and she’s so scared and fragile that people all but fall over themselves to tell her what she wants to know.

The first few people, Keris thinks, would have taken offence if she wasn’t just so naturally hard to suspect and innocent-looking. But eventually she finds a slightly tipsy old scarred soldier named Joula in a bar who’s willing to talk.

“Always been a problem with bodies not staying dead, out there in the Ros,” he says. “It happens. It’s the bandits, you see. When they kill travellers and dump their bodies in the swamp, the Dead don’t like it. Makes ‘em angry. Stick to the causeway, that’s my advice. But ten years back, lot of people died when there was a big battle over west. The losers ran into the Ros, and a lot of them never came out. They got cut down and left to rot, or... well, there’s all kinds of stickmud out there and if you’re in armour, you’ll drown fast-as.”

Keris shudders delicately. “But I’ll be safe if I stay on the causeway, yes?” she implores. “It doesn’t go near any of the... the horrible places I’ve heard of, that are touched by death?”

“Don’t worry your pretty head about that,” he says. “Gods, that makes me shiver. We’d be in trouble if one of those cursed places got near our road.”

((Can Keris innocently get the location of one such cursed place out of him?))  
((She tries, but he doesn’t have enough Occult or Lore to be able to tell them from “places where a lot of people died” - and she can tell this just from talking with him.))  
((Fair enough.))

Keris frowns. From what she can remember, to have so consistently the Dead rising is a bit weird. Maybe there’s some kind of small shadowland or two in the marsh itself, polluting the water.

... and now that she thinks of it, this marsh is _kinda weird_ anyway. It’s really wet here, when the lands around it are arid. Is it pulling all the water here or what? It could just be another microclime, she supposes... but it’s worth checking out nonetheless. Right now, though, she’s tired. And wants a massage. A really good one.

Blowing back into the room she and Kuha share, she exhales a stream of bloody vapour as her body shimmers like a mirage. Swirling in on itself and then up into humanoid form, the scarlet mist condenses and coalesces into a second Keris; clad in a simple tunic and shivering.

It - she - blinks for a moment, then pouts.

“I better get a massage of my own out of this,” she mutters, as she kneels down and starts tending to Keris’s aching feet. “Hi Kuha. Boss, am I sticking around outside you longer than just tonight?”

“Nuh uh,” mumbles Keris, blissful now that she’s getting a foot massage from skilled fingers that she can trust. After all; they’re hers. “Jus’ needed someone who knew wha’ they w’r’doin’. Mm. More pressure there.”

“Does that _hurt?_ ” Kuha asks curiously, leaning in. “You’re making her-you out of your own blood.”

“Sort of,” both Keris’s answer at the same time, and trade a giggle. The Gale continues, as the original sinks back into the bed and makes happy whimpering noises. “It’s painful, but a lot of the things I can do cost a bit of pain for me to do them, so I’m used to it. I bleed more than that when I make an region into water using the gifts of the Great Mother.” She pauses distractedly for a moment as she works around the boss’s ankle, then continues. “And pulling us back in feels good. Sometimes a bit of a head rush, but the feeling is nice.”

Kuha grins at Keris. “Hey, Kerishyra, you’re enjoying this a lot. Are you going to send me out with Cissidy and Rounen to get you some privacy? I don’t mind, really.”

The original Keris cracks an eye open. “Don’t think I haven’t, before,” she returns without a hint of shame. “But not tonight. I feel all fat and sore and achey. And my son keeps jabbing my kidneys. I think they’re doing some sort of dance in there. Here; feel.”

“You’ve been big for a very long time,” Kuha says, resting her hand there. “You have been like you are three seasons pregnant for... four seasons, maybe more.”

“Also, I don’t see why _I_ have to be like this,” the Gale says, pouting. “I’m not even having the damn babies, and I’m still as big as an airship.”

“It’s ‘cause of how they came to be,” Keris explains to Kuha. “That dream I had while I was running you across the Desert last year. There’s magic in them and it means... this.” She huffs. “I’m not doing it this way again for a while, I can tell you that much. And as for you...” she adds to her Gale. “... yeah, fair question. One I don’t have an answer to. Now, more massage! I’ll give you one once I’m done, and then breathe you back in.”

“Yeah, just as I hit the really good part, so you can have it too,” grumbles the Gale, but complies.

When she wakes the next morning, Keris is feeling much, much better. And her feet aren’t hurting as much, which is nice. Kuha is still asleep, and when Keris goes to wake her up she demands to be allowed to sleep more and complains a bit about how she’s covered in bug bites and hardly got any sleep. Keris treats the mosquito bites, but Kuha needs more rest so Keris decides to go out and take more of a look around this town - and maybe scout out the Lookshyian quarter a bit more from a safe distance.

She discovers that the market lies beside the west gate, while the centre is the temple district and the inner citadel. There are several temples to various gods - largest of all to Father Ros, the god of the Marsh, which is even larger than the pyramid-temple of the sun.

There’s a man in ragged robes, ranting in a street just off the main temple-square. “The heretics of Lookshy are offending Father Ros!” he shouts, spittle spraying. “Immaculate filth! Immaculate lies! They’ll ruin the rice crops! They’ll offend the gods! Those damn atheist Lookshyians don’t go to proper rituals and their faith doesn’t worship the gods! It worships elementals! We must change our ways, lest the gods take offence!”

Keris drifts over to listen to him at a distance safe from spittle, offering a tentative smile and an audience for his rantings. “How will Father Ros punish us for the offence if we don’t change?” she asks, during a lull between two screeds.

“Mock me if you must, _stranger_ ,” he rants, “but the swamp will turn on us! The rice will not grow! No crayfish! The birds will not come! The Immaculates murder gods and they are atheist fools, but we will pay the price for their sins!”

A fat man in a short red robe comes bustling up. “You mustn’t encourage him,” he tells Keris, wearily. “The man’s a fool - who’s banned from the square. He’s no a priest, not any more.” He glances Keris up and down. “I am Rounen Bharma, and what brings you to our town - so heavily pregnant, I might add?” Reaching out, he gestures to take Keris’ arm and lead her away from the ranting preacher and his spittle.

“Travelling west for the birth,” Keris replies with a half-smile. “Rounen, you say? I know another Rounen; he’s a good friend.”

He takes Keris in again. “Ah, yes, your hair mislead me, but you do look like one of my countrymen. But from your accent, I would have said you were Nexan,” he says, as he leads her towards the market square. “It is said to be good to return to one’s homeland for a birth. It keeps the blood healthy.”

“I’ve spent time in Nexus,” Keris nods. “But yes, I’m trying to find the village I was born in before I’m due. Where are we going?”

“I was headed on the way to the market myself - to speak with the merchant princess who arrived late last night. She’s one of your compatriots from Nexus, in fact - come to buy some of the products of the gifts of Ros, in fact. My trade is in herbs and spices, and there’s quite an assortment of rare things that grow in the Ros. What is your profession?” The bustle of the market is up ahead.

“Healing, with a little alchemy for medicines and the like,” Keris says warily. “But I should really pick up my bodyguard before going somewhere with a stranger. Not that I mean to insult your trustworthiness! She’s just very intent about sticking to protocols like that.” She smiles ruefully. “I’ll probably be in trouble for wandering out on my own, but I was hungry.”

“Ah ha, no concern, no concern. I have business myself,” this Rounen says. Their walk leads them to the nearest edge of the market, where the same wagons that Keris saw yesterday are stopped. “Well, if I could have your name, then...”

“Rounen Bharma, I presume?” a woman interrupts. She’s soft-spoken, and every syllable screams ‘Nexan’. “Do I have the pleasure of addressing the man I have come to meet?”

Keris focuses in on her like a Ligerian sunbeam. She hasn’t been back to Nexus since accidentally throwing it into chaos, and a Nexan merchant-princess here now is at minimum a suspicious coincidence. Keris’s eyes flash green behind modestly lowered lids as she scans the woman, everything on her and everything in the nearby wagons.

At minimum it’s a suspicious coincidence. But Keris knows for sure that there’s one type of product merchant-princes definitely come to Taira from Nexus for. Once upon a time, she was one of them.

She’s dressed in hard-wearing blues, greys and lilacs, but Keris knows for a fact that those are expensive dyes. Likewise, though her hair is covered in a headscarf, the scarf itself is expensive silk. She’s got a long dagger at each hip - finely made, but simply decorated - and her boots are solid and waterproof. Keris’ immediate evaluation is that she’s wealthy, but parsimonious about it. The only truly superfluous things she wears are the array of silver bangles around her wrists.

But all that flashes through her mind in a moment. Because she _knows that face_. She wracks her brain. Where from? It was Nexus, she thinks - but not on the streets. More recently than that.

Oh. Oh.

_ Keris successfully grabs a mouse with her hair. _  
__  
_... _  
__  
_... a mouse which is now a dusky skinned woman in her early twenties, her hair covered in the way that some Southerners do and wearing shabby clothes. More relevantly, she’s is swinging her fist towards Keris’ nose. _

And by the faint gasp of breath from the other woman, she recognises Keris too.


	3. Chapter 3

The mouse-woman recovers quickly. Her expression is blandly polite; her kohl-lined eyes watch Keris closely but with apparent disinterest. She smoothes down her lilac shawl, and politely inclines her head. “You did not say you were bringing a guest, Rounen Bharma,” she says. Tilting her head, she frowns. “Though she looks familiar. Excuse me, but what is your name?

It’s strange. At first, Keris feels towering contempt at a mere divine-child who’s barely more than mortal, but... no! That’s a lie! Under that placid layer is a much more potent force - still weaker than Keris, but stronger than any of her children and nearly as strong as a weak demon prince. And the chiming noise burns with cold white light of the moon.

((Enlightenment 7, Lunar essence, disguised as Enlightenment 1, divine essence))

She clamps down on the instinctive response to shake the woman and demand her plate back. That would... probably lead to Keris getting punched across the room again, though she’s confident that _this_ time - in the absence of a sinking barge, burning river and two allies to safeguard - she’d win handily.

Now... how would Sasi tell her to go about this?

“... it’s Keris,” she smiles pleasantly. “I seem to recall you too, though I don’t believe we ever traded names.” Catching a lock of hair, she rubs it thoughtfully between her fingers before brightening with a well-feigned stroke of sudden realisation. “Of course, the auction in Nexus the year before last! You... outbid me on a plate, I think. Am I right?”

The woman smiles politely. “Yes, that’s where I thought I knew you from. And there’s no need to be bitter, you know. I might have got my hands on that plate you desired, but you made a killing on those antique weapons you acquired, no? I am Illana Javi, Keris, and I am pleased to meet you properly.” Her accent is Nexan, but with a pronounced Southern streak.

((Cog + Lore to identify where from))   
((... I admire her pun-fu. I resent her thievery, but I admire her pun-fu. 3+2+2 stunt=7. 3 sux.))

‘Crap,’ Keris thinks, trying to place the accent. ‘She saw that.’ She’d been sort of hoping that the only ones who’d born witness to that particular theft - hilarious though it had been - had been the people involved in the fight.

Internally, she heard what sounded like Zanara’s Artist half let out a snort of laughter at the woman’s wordplay, and resisted the urge to roll her eyes. The accent was proving tricky. It had been a while since she’d left Nexus, and her memory of what the different strains of the South sounded like when mixed in with the general city twang wasn’t what it used to be. After a little thought she pinned it down as being from the Chiaroscuroan streets in Nexus. Merchants from that ruined glass city - one of the few cities that can call itself a rival to Nexus - ply the coastline all the way up to the Yanaze, and invariably crewmen jump ship or fall for Nexus’ delights. Keris mostly remembers it because there was a street of them just on the edge of Firewander - dusky skinned men and women who spoke Southern garble and broke the arms of beggars who lingered too long. Poor, but proud - and proud of not being like Kit-the-street-rat.

But then again, this woman, this Illana had been grubbier than they let their women or children go around looking in public.

“Perhaps,” Keris says. “But I _did_ have my heart set on it. Perhaps we could meet later and I could forgive you over a meal?” She gives a charming, innocent smile, then gasps again. “Oh, but I’m being rude - you came here to meet Rounen Bharma, not me. And I should really be getting back before my bodyguard comes looking for me.”

“Oh, no, no, please - we’re both so far from home, and it’s good to hear a Nexan accent for once. I’ll just see to my esteemed guest, but if you wouldn’t mind waiting for just a tiny bit I’ll have a gift for you.” She raises a hand. “Just a pot of plum preserve, but it’s something that I trade in. A reason to come back and visit me for later. Perhaps we can make a deal of our own?”

After a moment’s thought, Keris spreads her hands and accepts. It’s not like she was planning to go back to Kuha anyway, and this way she can eavesdrop more easily. “That sounds lovely,” she says. “And I agree, it’s nice to hear a Nexan accent after so long spent away.”

((Keris shamelessly proceeds to listen in on their entire conversation. : P))

Keris hears the usual fuss of negotiations beginning; going into a comfortable room, laying out things and so on - and then Illana smiles at him, flutters her eyelashes, and his breath hitches, and he starts breathing like he’s asleep. There’s a faint thud as his head hits the back of the chair.

Promptly she sidles out of that caravan, and smiles blandly at Keris. “He’s just taking a little nap. He’s clearly overworked.” She opens another caravan, lushly decorated with soft gold-trimmed violet hangings and cushions, and calls for food and the best treatment from her servants. “Now, Keris,” she says in Rivertongue, her Nexan accent thickening, “let’s talk about more interesting things than we can talk about in front of some member of a petty small-town family.”

“Yeah,” Keris replies in kind. “Starting with what happened to my _plate_ , you little... mouse... lady.” She scowls, reluctantly impressed. “You know how many people can get away from me in the middle of a river? How many people could do it even back then? None. None is how many. I think you’re the only person to have managed it yet. Do you still have it?” She rather suspects not, given the wealth Illana has apparently come into, but she has to ask.

“It’s long gone,” Illana says, without a hint of shame, as she leads Keris into the caravan. Darting out, she returns with a plate of small spicy pastries decorated with mulberries and a bottle of deep purple plum wine. “Try the wine,” she says, pouring a measure of both into two small clay cups. “It’s something I picked up along the coastline. It’s very sweet, but I’ve acquired quite a taste for it.”

She closes the door behind her, flicks a latch, and Keris can hear the noise shift. She can’t hear a thing outside the caravan anymore. The dead silence is disconcerting.

“And for that part, you were responsible for the death of my mentor,” she says in a same neutral tone. “And stole his knives, which is what let the Terrestrials kill him.”

((Rolling Compassion - 4 dice; 3 sux.))

“... ... ...” says Keris.

The dead silence hangs in the air like a body.

“... oh,” she says lamely. The syllable flutters out into the oppressive space between the two women and dies. For lack of anything better to do, Keris picks up the cup nearer her, though for the life of her she’s not remotely in the mood to eat or drink anymore.

“I,” she adds. “I didn’t realise the two of you were. Connected.” In hindsight, she can see the scheme clearly - the mentor as the distraction; big and obvious and flashy to draw attention, with his younger student sneaking in stealthily to steal where the risk was lower. Like the Dragonblooded in An Teng, and the magistrate clanking around in his armour while his friends snuck up behind her.

Maybe the reason she’s bad at spotting things like that is because she’s so stealthy she’s never needed them much, Keris thinks, before remembering something else she should probably say. “I’m... sorry.” Not so much for the theft of Ascending Air, or even leaving Naween to be killed, but Illana didn’t really deserve to see her mentor gutted in front of her.

“So how about we just leave bygones as bygones and put the past behind us?” Illana says, voice not shifting an inch or letting any emotion out. “No debts or honour grudges or anything on either side. I’m willing to be the bigger woman here.”

Keris’s hand automatically gravitates to her belly, and she runs through a litany of curses as she sees Illana notice. She tenses ever-so-slightly, focusing on Illana’s body language and breathing with the intensity of a razor blade to try and determine if she means it. Keris wouldn’t, if their positions were reversed. She can’t read any hint of hostility or anger or any murderous intent, though. She takes a slow breath, deliberately relaxing her muscles with an effort of will. “That. Sounds like a good idea,” she agrees. “Especially right under the noses of a Lookshyian fort.”

The other woman smiles faintly, raising her glass. “After all, I hated him,” she says. “I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to be dragged into his crusade, and I tried to explain to the idiot that he risked getting on the wrong side of the Emissary with his plans.” She salutes Keris with her plum wine. “Foreigners, hmm? So very stupid.”

Keris has the sneaking suspicion she just got played. Zanara is certainly giggling in her head. She’s mildly irked, but honestly the relief at not having a blood feud to deal with is more than enough to dissipate that.

“You,” she grins, “are a dangerous woman. And yes, my first thought on seeing him from the bank was that he was an overly loud flashy idiot and you’d at least been subtle about it. What are you doing in this- wait, no, did you grow up on the streets too? Where was your squat? I never saw you in Firewander, and I _know_ I’d have run into you.”

“ _Child_ ,” Dulmea says, but Keris ignores her, intent on her question.

“Firewander? Goodness, no, that place is dangerous,” Illana says. “I’m from Nighthammer. The best district. And no squat, no - I paid my rent, Right until I got the coughs from the textile mills. Have you ever been in one?” Keris shakes her head. “They’re bad places. It’s hot, humid, and you’re coughing by the end of the day from the threads.”

“Three of us, that makes...” Keris mutters to herself. “All different, and all... you paid your rent, but you weren’t rich, were you? All of us poor, all the same age, all in Nexus and even pretty close in time...”

Her fingers move over the swell of her twins. “I wonder if that means something? Maybe just that if you pile up enough scum, you’re bound to find some jewels in it.”

She shakes her head, snapping out of wistful philosophy. “More to the point, what are you _here_ for? I was born down here; I’m trying to find my hometown for the...” She gestures at her belly. “But it’s a hell of a coincidence running into you, here and now, a month or more’s travel from Nexus.”

“Well, since the Guild took over what remained of the Council, they’ve been selling entry fees cheap...” Illana begins.

The table goes flying.

When the flurry of movement stops, Keris has both blades of Ascending Air out and her hair is filling half the caravan, writhing and snapping at the air like a nest of fanged snakes. She’s wide-eyed and panting and trembling with rage, but shoves the kerises back into her hair after belatedly realising she’s drawn them.

“The Guild,” she repeats blankly, “did _what?_ ”

Illana seems more shocked at the fact that Keris has spilt plum wine over her fine velvet cushions. “Where have you been?” she asks. “After most of the Council back-stabbed each other in the chaos or died in other ways, the merchant princes presented their case to the Emissary - or so the story goes - and persuaded it that they could better enforce the Dogma than the Council. So the old Council... well, rumour is that there’s a bit of the Dogma that they agree to that failure to keep things stable means their lives are forfeit. So they all died, and now the Guild runs the Council.”

“In. In the southwest,” Keris says, still blank and with a faint high-pitched ringing in her ears. “And the northeast for a while; out on the very edges of Creation. This is the first time I’ve been back to the Scavenger Lands since...”

She runs a shaking hand through her hair, oblivious to the way her hair bites it. “The... the _whole_ Council? All eight of... wait, then the Civility against open slavery; that’s not part of the Dogma, did they...?”

“I haven’t been back, either,” Illana admits. “I... bought, shall we say... a position in the Guild, and since then I’ve been travelling.” Her eyes narrow fractionally. “There’s nothing left for me in Nexus.”

Keris sits down heavily, taming her hair with an arm and considerable effort. After a moment’s struggle, she resorts to sitting on it until it calms down. “I need a moment,” she says. “For that to sink in. Um. Okay. Okay. The Guild owns Nexus now. Nexus is... property of the Guild.”

She tries to make that concept make sense. It still doesn’t. She takes a few more deep breaths she doesn’t strictly need, and checks to see if her hair has stopped writhing. It has.

“Sorry,” she adds. “I’m a bit... being back in my homeland, being due soon. It has me off balance. You really are just here to trade, then? No hidden depths?”

“There’s a war on down here,” Illana says. “Mercenaries need supplies. Mercenaries are rich with plunder. The lords of Taira are putting themselves in debt, bleeding out silver. There’s ruins down here, from long ago, that people like me - and I suspect you - are into. And that’s why we’re both here, I’m willing to bet. We both found out about these Lookshyian bastards and wondered what on earth they were willing to send an entire talon of men to go after.”

Keris stays quiet for a moment.

“Child,” says Dulmea. “Do not.”

“... I didn’t wonder,” says Keris. “I know. That’s half of what I’m here for.” She looks Illana over with sharp, assessing eyes. “I wonder whether you’d like to help me with it?”

“First, let’s hear what you’ve been up to,” Illana says with a disarming smile. “I’ve given you an abridged summary of what I’ve been doing since last time. Fair’s fair, after all. The southwest, hmm?”

Keris grins. “Alright. I may not be dressed the part right now, but you’re looking at a bonafide pirate queen. Got myself a nice little warship for my flagship, along with a captured fleet waiting for repairs to be seaworthy again. And I took a half-year off to go fae-hunting up in the northeast. Wiped out a Wyld Zone full of flesh-eating teeth-men and hungry giants.” Her grin shifts to a smirk as she leans back, hands behind her head. “Well, I say ‘wiped out’...”

“Hmm?”

“Let’s just say that raksha fetch a very high price among certain buyers when rendered down the right way,” Keris says smugly, “and leave it at that. And, I mean. It’s not like anyone will miss them. They’re _fae_.”

“Very well. Fair is fair,” Illana says, not letting anything slip. Keris has a slight nagging feeling that she’s gotten soft, that she’s not used to people who can control their voice and their reactions to a degree that her hearing can’t pick it out. “So... I believe you had a proposition about the Lookshyians here?”

“The place is called Eshtock. It was trapped behind some defence called up back during the Balorian Crusade to defend it from the fae, but the Lookshyians’ pet sorcerer managed to dispel it not long ago and they moved in like locusts. They’ve already shipped out a full arsenal of Shogunate plate and more, but the city’s rotted since the Cataclysms and they haven’t found everything yet.”

Keris pauses there, thinking. Telling Illana the next bit is a risk - if she spills to Lookshy, Keris’s mission is over before it begins. But. She’s Nexan. It’s doubtful she holds any love for Lookshy or for Thorns. At least in theory, she should see absolutely nothing objectionable about Orange Blossom’s plan - quite the opposite, in fact.

“Strangely enough, that’s what I’d heard too.” Illana leans forwards, tapping her forefingers together, by now distracted from the wine staining her expensive purple cushions. “Their junior officers are chatty when they think they’re just with their companions and aren’t looking for a nearby bird. I scouted this place out before I moved my caravan here - and I got my hands on a copy of the map they’re making of the city. It’s probably out of date now, but they’re being thorough.”

“That is a really useful trick,” Keris comments. She closes her eyes for a moment. “Alright... alright, fine. Here it is. I’m doing a favour for an ally in return for something. Their plan is to assassinate the commander of the Lookshyian forces and frame Thorns. Get the Dead city and Lookshy at each other’s throats and off everyone else’s turf. And here’s the rub; I can take whatever I want while I’m doing it - but I can only pillage _everything_ if I make it look like an army of the dead got called up to do it, or it’ll give the game away.” She leans forward. “I have no real love for Lookshy, and Thorns has been owed something like this for years. I might be able to get in and set things up to look right on my own - but I could do it a hell of a lot better with help. And you’d stand to gain from whatever else is left up there. If I’m only taking the best, there’ll be more than enough for two - and if we find a way to take everything, I’ll agree to split it between us.”

Illana’s eyes widen. “Assassinate the shozei, Amiliar Mena, in the middle of a camp of his own troops?” she says, tilting her head. “When neither of us could even unleash our true power without giving away that we’re not Dead? Can’t be done.”

Keris smiles. “I can do it. Even on my own, I can do it. I walked into a Wyld zone five stories deep and ruled by a hungry giant as strong as you are - as strong as you _really_ are, beneath that lie of divinity. And I killed every single fae in that place and walked away without a scratch. I stole the knives out of the hands of your mentor mid-battle without letting loose even a glint of my soul’s light. I’ve run with-”

She cuts off, deciding not to share that last one. But the ring of truth in her words is undeniable nonetheless.

“If it makes you feel any better, though,” she adds, “I’ll be the one making the kill. I just need you to help with the setup and framing. And I have a few ideas on how to distract the troops. Depending on how well they work, we might even be able to make off with the better part of the treasure.”

“I’ve killed a Dragonblood. It was the hardest fight I’ve ever been in - and she was a bandit queen who felt my caravan was easy pickings,” Illana says, voice icy. “Not a Lookshyian veteran with another ten or so Dragonblooded near him, potentially. Maybe you could take him on his own. Could you do it without unleashing your true power? What about against five Lookshyian veterans? Six? Seven?”

Keris closes her eyes meditatively. “Against a full Brotherhood? No, not without unleashing my soul in full. I _can_ disguise its flavour, but I’d rather avoid it at that range - and that fight would still be too close for comfort. But that’s why we plan. When I attack him, it’ll be when I’ve made sure that he’s alone, and that his comrades can’t come to help him fast enough.” She opens her eyes. “I’m not going to be subtle about this. If I have to lure a Greater Dead thing up from the Underworld and crash it into the middle of their camp as a distraction, that’s what I’ll do.”

“I’ll... need to think about that,” Illana says, eventually. Her dark brows are furrowed. “Personally, I think you’re mad to thinking of that. I’m here to find out what they’re looking for, and maybe stealing anything particularly sellable. I’m not looking to die to an impromptu Wyld Hunt.” And her expression flickers back to its usual slightly amused neutrality. “Of course, I’ll be willing to trade with you for any information I find and you want,” she adds.

“I need what my ally has,” Keris says simply. “Believe me, I’m not looking to die either, but this is one of those bargains that you don’t break.” She thins her lips. “Would you at least be interested in a temporary alliance to scout the area? There’s not much risk involved in _that_ , and it gets us both information on what they’re doing.”

“That’s something much more fair,” she says, pouring out another cup of wine for the two of them. “On the condition that you can actually be subtle and it’s not just me doing all the work.”

In response, Keris closes her eyes and disappears; fading into the lines of the walls and furniture like a chameleon.

There’s a light in Illana’s eyes as she watches, a gleam of its own not unlike the one Keris uses. And yet it’s not green. Keris isn’t sure what colour it is. She’s not sure she has the words for it. But it’s gone so quickly she’s not entirely sure it’s there.

“Oh, and you’re even imitating the stains on the cushions,” Illana says, staring straight at Keris. “How nice.”

Pouting, Keris fades back into visibility. “Generally I don’t let people literally see me do it,” she grumbles. “And I have proper cover. Nice trick with the eyes, by the way.”

Illana only smiles. “We all have our little tricks. Where _do_ yours come from, by the way?”

“Oh, around,” says Keris blithely. “I’m sure you already have a theory or two. Want to share?”

“No, no, I’m quite all-right. I wouldn’t want to put myself in your debt.”

Keris cocks her head. “Oh, come on now,” she grins. “A few hypotheticals between friends surely wouldn’t leave anyone owing.”

Beneath the humour, a quiet knot of cold has formed. Thus far, the secret of the Infernals has been kept from most of Creation. Illana doesn’t seem the type to spill it for no reason, but if she’s worked it out... Keris needs to either kill her or convince her not to sell the information. The first prospect is not especially appealing, but the second...

... well. A Lunar ally that Unquestionable like Orabilis don’t know about might prove very useful in a worst-case scenario.

“I’m a sorceress,” Illana says, picking her words with care. “I can recognise the marks of Hell. I’m not sure what you are - exactly - but you didn’t deny that you can unleash the fullness of your power. You’re not a demon, though. I’ve read about creatures like the Glowing Ones of the Mad Green Sun, or the akuma-champions of the Heavenly Inferno Who Is Astrea - things that are almost human, almost akin to the Chosen of the Gods.”

“I still need to meet one of them,” Keris says thoughtfully. “They sound really interesting. And I could benefit from a good long look at how they work. But yes, you’re more or less right.” She lifts her hair up in a shrug. “I’m a hellish champion - one made with power from more than one of the Yozis. But it turns out that when you stitch a thing together by putting lots of different bits from all over into something mostly human, it doesn’t necessarily obey any of its makers like a being made purely from one source would.” She grins, all sharp teeth and edges. “Something I haven’t let on to those whose orders I take. Yet. Though my... primary patron, let’s say, mostly just wants raksha to boil down and make things with. Which I wouldn’t argue with even if I could.”

Pausing for a moment, Keris allows herself to stretch. It’s been a while since she’s had to fast-talk like this, and it’s the kind of lying she does to fool Sasi. Which is to say, not really lying at all. Just being selective with what bits of truth she tells, and _believing_ them. That’s the real trick. To _become_ the role. To focus just on the parts of her that are honest about what she’s saying, and forget the others. The best way to deceive, after all, is with the unvarnished truth.

((Per + Pres))   
((3+5+3 Mendaciloquent Maverick+1 bonus {contains no falsehoods}+2 stunt+4 Metagaos ExSux {lurks in plain sight, deceptive, false familiarity}=14. Haha, _yess_. 11+4=15 sux. Keris is MASTER OF FAST-TALKING PRANA.))   
((... honestly, that’s a depressingly believable “the Unquestionable fucked up” story. Some Third Circle decides to make a knockoff Exalted champion all Claymore-style by stitching together an amalgam-thing with a human base, and it turns out that the result has enough human left, and enough demon bits that conflict with each other, that it can pass for a free-willed being. And promptly decides not to tell anyone.))

“Hmm.” And that’s all she says for a while, as she monitors Keris, tapping her index fingers together. Her silver bangles clatter as she does that. “I don’t trust you, of course. But I suspect you’d be insulted if I trusted you.”

“Probably,” Keris agrees with macabre cheerfulness. “Look, I won’t lie here. I don’t entirely trust you not to run off and report me to... oh, one of the many, many factions who’d want me dead if they knew I existed. But it occurs to me that a Lunar ally who operates on the other side of Creation from where most of my work takes place - one that my masters don’t _know_ about - could be valuable. In a worst-case scenario. Especially given my condition.” She rests a hand on the twins again and adds, “Also most of the factions who’d want me dead want you dead too, so that eases my worries. Slightly.”

“And on your part... I’m powerful. Unpalatable, maybe, but you can trust this if nothing else - I have very few friends in Creation. I value the ones I have. If you’re one of them, I can’t _afford_ to betray you. And once I finish up my business in Taira and go back west, we won’t be stepping on each other’s toes. A pact of mutual secrecy and some occasional information trades would be nice and helpful for both of us.”

“I’m not asking for or offering trust. But I think a chance to earn some - on each side - might pay off for both of us.”

Illana spreads her hands. “You believe you can take down a Lookshyian veteran one on one, and don’t doubt it. The hardest fight of my life was against a wind-bandit. I’d have to be a fool to cross you. And - yes, I might think you’re mad to go to take on a Wyld Hunt, but I’m entirely interested in stealing from a ruined Shogunate city. So at the very least, this is a workable basis for things.”

Keris extends a hand. “A temporary pact, then? To scout only, for now. Anything else after more negotiation.”

Illana pauses before taking her hand. “I’d rather not. I don’t know what you could do with skin contact. But I’ll drink to the deal if you will.”

Cautiously touching a thin hair to the wine, Keris listens to the song of essence within, assessing it for poison or magic. It is simply a very sweet plum wine, more purple than red, with some spices added to it - a hint of ginger and lemongrass. Reassured, she nods agreement. “Fair caution on your part. To a pact, then.” She sips rather than gulps, though compared to hellish brews, this stuff is weak enough that it probably wouldn’t hurt her children even if she drained the whole thing. Especially given her body’s resilience and the unnatural structure of her womb.

“So... say we’ll meet again in... a week?” Illana suggests. “I have business here so I can’t spend all my time investigating matters. No doubt the Lookshyians are looking for spies, so you’d best take care, too.”

“I can’t promise I won’t do some early looking around, but yes, I’ll be careful,” says Keris. “A week is a little longer than I’d like, but I’m willing to wait if it’s for aid like yours.”

“Well, you know where I am if you’re done earlier,” Illana says.

Keris slips out of the strange magic caravan that Illana has set up so no one can listen to. As she paces through the market, she hears the Lunar begin talking to the merchant, speaking in a low soft voice as she convinces him that she doesn’t blame him for dozing off in the quiet and privacy while she exchanged words with an old friend. Keris rubs a strand of hair thoughtfully between finger and thumb as she heads back to Kuha and the room they’ve rented. Maybe it would be best to move, just in case... but then again, she hadn’t said where she was staying. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t be too hard for Illana to find her... but moving outside the town altogether would be a lot less comfortable for Kuha, and bring up problems with the Dead. She could change their faces and leave a Gale in place, she supposed... but was it really worth that level of paranoia, when running to the Lookshyians would risk Illana as well? At the very least she’d have to abandon her caravan and flee...

Her thoughts are interrupted by a cleared throat and a strum of... yes, okay, that is very definitely annoyed-Dulmea music.

“So,” Dulmea says, each syllable crisp, each sound elongated. “Would you care to tell me precisely what you were playing at there? And whether you told Echo and Zanara to interfere and distract me?”

“I did not explicitly tell Echo to interfere and distract you,” Keris promises, conveniently mishearing the latter part of the question. “And as for what was going on there; that was me making a temporary ally for this mission. There could be as many as a dozen Dragonblooded in that camp, and I’d rather have a powerful Lunar on my side than working on her own scheme when I go in. Remember Nexus?”

“Get out of sight, come in, talk to me properly,” Dulmea demands, sounding actually furious.

Keris pauses for a moment, uncertain. Then, biting her lip, she hastily makes her way back to the room she shares with Kuha.

“New development,” she explains shortly. “I need to meditate on it for a while. Don’t go out or do anything to draw attention until I’m awake again, and don’t disturb me.” That said, she settles herself cross-legged on the bed and sinks into her Domain.

When she comes out, it’s not in the dome atop the Tower Melodious, where she usually appears to talk to Dulmea. Instead she’s in the large chamber at the bottom of the tower - the one where her mother holds the City court and passes judgement on civil disagreements. Four Dulmea-Chords look down on her from their high seats, each plucking out short, sharp notes and glaring.

“I see you got dragged in here by her too,” Zanara says glumly, standing next to Keris. She’s in her female form, her hair is pink and teal, and she’s got a ball and chain tied to her leg. “Echo ran away when she tried to chain her up.”

“Lucky Echo,” Keris mutters. “Think we could follow suit?”

“You prob’ly could. I can’t get out of these chains. I tried. And she’s keeping he-me away from here... and even if I went and became him, I wouldn’t be able to become she-me for ages because she’d put this body in jail.” Zanara says, picking her nose.

Keris sighs, and takes Zanara’s hand - partly out of sympathy, and partly to get her to stop. “Well, I guess I can’t abandon you to a scolding,” she sighs. “Dulmea, I get that you’re angry, but-”

“Me?” Dulmea asks in chorus, manifesting in full in all four Gales. “Why would I be _possibly_ angry?”

“Just...” Keris says, wincing, “... an impression I’m getting. From, uh. The courtroom. And glaring. And manacles.”

“That’s not what I asked. _Why_ would I be angry, Keris? Why?”

Hanging her head, Keris sighs. “You don’t like that I talked to her. You _really_ don’t like that I made an alliance with her. And you’re ready to drop a layer on me for nearly giving away what I am.”

“Oh, so _now_ you’re using your brain.” Dulmea’s hands stroke the air; not in agitation, but in anger. “You let her get almost all the way to working out what the green sun princes are. You just... talked to her. You walked into this place wearing your true form and got recognised because of it.” She wearily sighs. “I thought I’d taught you better than this,” she says, voice low and... hurtful.

“Hey, that’s nothing to do with...” Zanara begin.

“You. Silence. I’ll deal with you later,” Dulmea snaps. “I gave birth to you, yet you don’t respect me. That will change in future.”

“This place is _three months travel_ from Nexus!” Keris objects. “And further than that from Matasque! I _look_ like a native here! If I’d done this in An Teng and been recognised, fine, but you can’t say I was stupid for... for getting _unlucky_ that some random woman I ran into _one time_ two whole _years_ ago would happen to be in this tiny marsh town while I was! _You’ve_ been unlucky like that before!” It’s a guess, but one she feels confident in. Nobody as experienced as Dulmea can possibly have gotten that way without at least one mission where things went horribly wrong through no fault of their own.

“No. Not in this way. If I was as sloppy as you, I’d be long dead,” Dulmea says. “You are willing to be sloppy, even when you have _direct_ orders from the Unquestionable to conceal your nature from the Chosen of Creation.”

“If I’m going to work with her, she’s going to notice the Hell-taint sooner or later. Better to get it out of the way early and feed her a lie that whatever she sees will support,” Keris shoots back. “The best lies use the truth; I’ve known that since I was six.”

“You _encouraged_ her to speculate on what you were - and I doubt she buys your story completely. If she ever sees your forehead-brand, she’ll know for certain that you are Chosen,” Dulmea counters. “You’re sloppy. Why did you even approach her?”

((Poor Dulmea-mama. She’s a professional, dealing with someone who’s more of a James Bond-style infiltrator.))   
((I’m surprised she didn’t go “you shouldn’t be working with her at all!”))

“She’s Nexan!” Keris wheels around, throwing her hair in the air. “She doesn’t buy any story completely, even if it’s sworn to by three devout grandmothers and the Emissary itself! But _since_ she’s Nexan, I know her better than most other allies I might find. I can guess at how she’ll react to things; what she’ll value, how to win her over. And she’d already spotted me - which wasn’t my fault - so she wouldn’t have just let me go.”

“It was your fault. You knew there were Lookshyians around, but you didn’t hide yourself from _them_ when exploring the town. You say it was unlucky that she found you - I say it was lucky that they didn’t find you.” Her hair pulls on her hair. “I have _tried_ to teach you that the way to do these things is to, at all times, minimise the risks you expose yourself to. There is no room for mistakes at all when infiltrating the fortress of a demon lord to kill his favoured citizen-general. But you... you are _sloppy_.” Dulmea’s voice is harsh, sharp.

Keris hesitates, her own hair settling slightly as she sees Dulmea pull at hers. It’s an uncharacteristic move. She’s been scolded for sloppiness before, but her mother seems especially agitated this time. Dulmea has her hackles up. Keris winces internally as she remembers just how prideful her mother can be about her professional skills.

((Dulmea’s 4 dot Principle of Professional Pride, and 3 dot of Maternal Role (Strict Standards)))   
((*wince*))

“I’m... I’m sorry.” She ducks her head. “You’re right, I’m being sloppy. I just... it’s because I want this mission _over_ with, quickly, so that I can move on to Baisha. I’m getting impatient and... that’s making me slip, like you said before. Impatience is the enemy,” she quotes with a sigh. “Retain your calm and never rush things.”

“Oh, come on!” Zanara explodes. “Stop grumping at Keris, _Mother_. Doesn’t Naan get to run all over the place making stuff explode in really big booms? And Hanny says stupid Deveh is making all the bits of An Teng all crystally and stuff! You’re just being blah blah blah at her when she did nothing wrong!”

“Listen to me, you little...” Dulmea begins.

“I don’t have to listen to you! I’m going to go tell Rathan you’re being mean and not trusting Keris,” Zanara fumes. Her form twists up, and petrifies, becoming a stone statue of paint-streaked marble. That also has its middle fingers raised up at Dulmea. Keris quietly puts her head in her hands to hide her smile. She’s not sure she can convincingly keep a poker face while looking at Dulmea or the statue.

“... she gets that from you,” Dulmea says, tone mixed weary and shocked. “You, and Haneyl - only unlike Haneyl, she doesn’t seem to care what I think.”

“She cares,” says Keris, muffled. “She wouldn’t get angry if she didn’t care.” She lifts her head again. “I’d always get angriest at Calley when I was living on the streets. I didn’t give a toss about Old Man Baraj’s rants when we pilfered his bins, but I liked Calley, so I lashed out when she yelled at me or called me stupid.”

“Maybe, maybe.” Dulmea sighs, holding her head in her hair. “I didn’t want her, and I fear she knows.” The entire tone of the conversation has changed. Somehow, by doing what she’s done, Zanara-girl has made herself an enemy to Dulmea - and thus distracted her from her anger at Keris, already moderated by the apology.

“Do you play with her?” Keris asks timidly. “She’s a beautiful musician, and she’s actually really sweet when she’s absorbed in her art. I think whatever part of her nature makes her poke people so they react gets quietened by it.”

“Sometimes, sometimes. But even then, she refuses to keep to the _proper forms_. She gets bored of the threads of time and starts drumming, or pulls out one of those nonsense-instruments she makes with Vali.” Dulmea shakes her heads. “Zanara is much easier when they are him.”

“I am sorry for being sloppy,” Keris says quietly. “But what I said to Illana about an alliance wasn’t a total lie. Ligier said he’d get them all assigned as lesser peers, but... until it _happens_ , Dulmea, I can’t relax completely. And even when it does, I can’t be sure it’ll stay that way forever. If the Unquestionable ever turn on me... I need options. Allies. Places to hide.” She slumps a little. “I can’t fight them if that happens. I was mad to ever think I could.”

“You like her.” It’s a blunt statement.

“She’s Nexan. And poor and smart and fierce. And she probably Exalted about the same time as me - maybe a little later. If she’d been born in Firewander she might have wound up running with me and... Rat.”

Keris frowns. “Do you think it means anything? Three Exalted from Nexus, all young, all poor, all part-foreign, all from the streets or a bare step away from them... all in the same five years, even. All Chosen differently. Is there... is there some sun-child or star-chosen wandering around who grew up under a Little Market stall, or mucking out a pigpen along the Inner Docks?”

“Nexus is big, and full of strife,” Dulmea says. “It is like a little cousin to the City. The people who can survive in a place like that are more special than those who live in,” her nose wrinkles. “soggy, quiet towns like this one.”

Keris preens. “Damn right they are. Nexus is the...”

Her face falls. “... property of the Guild now,” she finishes. “Some victory.”

“It’s how things go. A new lord always takes a rich area, when the old lord falls,” Dulmea says. “That is life.”

She’s sounding more demonic than usual.

“Not in Nexus,” Keris sighs. “Nexus was... different. Nexus was meant to carry on for...”

She grimaces and shakes her head. “Well, hang it. I guess the Nexus I knew died when it sold out to the Guildsmen. I’m gonna go explain this to Kuha and then... work out what to do next.”

“It might be an idea to check on Rathan and make sure Zanara isn’t feeding lies into his ears,” Dulmea says quickly. “I’ll confine _that_ statue-body somewhere until she feels like apologising.”

“I’ll be sure to defend your scolding,” Keris says dryly. “... and I should probably reassure Rathan that I’m not replacing him with a Lunar or something. You know how he gets about other moons.”

“That is probably quite wise,” Dulmea says, gesturing with her hair. The grand doors open behind Keris.

It turns out, when she finds him, that Zanara found Rathan in the middle of touring an iceberg-town. Most of its residents are staring enthralled at the two princes - one tall, slender and exasperated, the other shorter and surprisingly close to a human baseline apart from the extra set of hands where feet should be and the row of barnacle shells in place of a left arm.

The latter is loudly complaining, and appears to have been doing so for a while.

The inhabitants fall to their faces and prostrate themselves before Keris. Well, some of them. The fact that they’re about third keruby means that it’s rather incoherent and a lot of them have to be tugged down by their compatriots.

“Do you like it, mama?” Rathan asks, concerned. “I know I’m still working on it, but I’ve told my lords to train people to bow to me and you.”

((Hmm. Rolling Temperance and Compassion. Botch on Temperance - much ego boost, very pleasing. 1 sux on Compassion.))

Keris considers. It _is_ a pretty nice ego-boost - she still remembers how _everyone_ in Ligier’s shipyard while her ship was being rebuilt had hit the ground as soon as he walked in. It brings up a few unpleasant memories as well - of being forced to curtsey or kneel whenever the ladies in charge of the house were near - but if it’s just a quick demonstration of respect...

“As long as they don’t stay bowed,” she says. “It would be a bit of a waste of time for them to not do anything the whole time I was here, don’t you think? And I’m sure you want them doing their jobs so you aren’t troubled by any annoying bits of work left unfinished.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Rathan says casually. He twists to look down at a kerub following in his wake. “Count Ulon, take me, my brother and my mother to that conservatory you were telling me about.”

The conservatory is a ice-windowed room leaning out over the water. The red moon beams down through the ice, and the lights of the City paint colours over the blue. Rathan sends the count away, so it’s just the three of them in this.

“So, what’s this about grandmother bullying you?” he demands, back upright.

“She’s not _bullying_ me,” Keris defends. “She just got... upset about something I did. You know how she gets when she thinks I’m being sloppy about stealth. There was some yelling. Angry harp music.” She hesitates. “... a full four-Chord court session she dragged me into. Oh, yeah. Zanara, I’m afraid she-you is going to be locked up for a while. Really didn’t do her-yourself any favours by flipping her off like that.”

Zanara looks up at her. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I didn’t mean to do that and I-me wouldn’t have done that, but she-me got angry because grandmother was being so mean to you, mama.”

“I know, I know.” She draws him into a hug. “Dulmea just gets upset because she-you doesn’t follow the rules. She’s the same way with Vali. It’s not your fault.”

Picking him up onto her hip with a faint grunt of effort, she addresses Rathan again. “Do you remember... well no, you won’t, because you weren’t born yet. But have you read about the auction in Nexus, on the mission where Sasi and I fell in love? It was just before you were born - I dove down into the lake that became the Sea and swam your moon up into the sky not long after it was all finished.”

“No.” Rathan sits down in one of the chairs, sprawling out in the kind of insolent way he’s fond of. He’s not wearing a shirt under his robe. “What happened, mama?”

“Well, Sasi and I were in Nexus to get me revenge on Makoa Kasseni.”

Rathan’s eyes narrow. Keris smirks. “Yeah, _that_ name you recognise. Thought you might. So, I’d already snuck into her home, and I could have killed her then, but I wanted to drag it out. Make it _last_. So Sasi and I went to a riverboat auction that she would be attending, as part of... well, quite a long and complicated plan that I’ll tell you all about some other time. It was a grand auction with lots of artifacts and precious things - Haneyl would have loved it - and it got attacked halfway through by an idiot Lunar prince who summoned a horde of burning oil demons to carpet the river and sink the barge.”

She rolls her eyes, expressing quite clearly what she thinks of _that_ plan.

“But there was another Lunar there, and she was much sneakier. I only noticed her because of how good my hearing is. Nearly caught her, but she turned into a mouse and made off with the plate I’d put up for sale to get into the auction. And then I stole the weapons the Lunar prince was using, which turned out to be Ascending Air. Right out of his hands. While he was using them. Against three Dragonblooded.” Keris smirks. “That was a beautiful theft, it really was. Still proud of it.”

Clearing her throat, she gets back to the point. “Anyway, I walked into the market today and there was a rich Nexan merchant-princess there. Guess who?”

“...” says Rathan. “Why wasn’t I told about this?! Zanara! I wouldn’t been watching! Mama! Why didn’t you use me to make her not-suspect you of anything bad!”

“Because she wasn’t all that ill-inclined to me,” Keris says. “I got her mentor killed, yes, but she sort of hated him. Neither of us really hurt the other back in Nexus - just a quick scuffle and then she ran off while I went to help Sasi. Also I’m pretty sure she can see magic being used, so I didn’t want to let her know about you just yet.”

“The end result of our little... talk, was a temporary alliance. She doesn’t like Lookshy any more than I do, and she’s definitely keen on stealing from Eshtock. We’re sharing information, but she’s wary about helping with the assassination. Still, I might be able to talk her into helping me frame Thorns, with your help and Zanara’s.” She winks. “Won’t that be fun? But of course Dulmea is upset about me being recognised at all, and more so about the fact that she... sort of nearly worked out about the Green Sun Princes.”

Rathan shakes his head sadly, long red hair falling around his face. “Mama,” he says, sounding simply disappointed. “If you’d called on me, things would have gone better.” He frowns. “Also, I don’t like you dealing with other moons! You can’t trust them at all! And they’re tricksy and she’ll try to steal you with all her silvery moon-ness. Moons shouldn’t be silver, you know. It’s not natural.”

“I’ll definitely make sure you’re watching for the next talk I have with her,” Keris promises. “But if I have to deal with any other Exalts, don’t you think it’s best I deal with another moon instead of a sun-chosen or a starry-eyed one or a Dead champion or a Dragonblood? Other moons might not be trustworthy - and neither of us _do_ trust the other one yet - but they’re not as bad as the alternatives.”

“But she’ll hate you if she thinks you’re working for Hell,” Rathan whines. “All of Creation is mean and hates us for that unless you have me help you.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Keris says. “She worked that much out already. And _I_ tricked _her_ into thinking that I was a hell-thing that had got a bit more free will than I was meant to, and who wasn’t so bad after all.” She bounces Zanara on her him, and he nods thoughtfully.

“It _was_ pretty tricksy,” he contributes. “And mama did the thing again where she lies about everything without actually properly lying.”

Rathan pouts adorably. “I don’t like people knowing,” he mutters. “Well, most people. Obviously Sasimana and the Unquestionable can know. They’re different.”

Brooding, he looks out over the ocean, across the City to the faint green glow on the Swampwards horizon. “I wonder how Haneyl is getting on,” he says softly. “She’s been gone for a whole month, almost.”

((Hmm. They’ve probably been trading IMs every ten-day via Sasi.))

“She missed last tenday’s message because of that ‘work experience’ trip Sasi has her on,” Keris says. “But in the ones before that she hasn’t sounded too upset. Busy, mostly. But yes, I miss her as well.” Her lips twitch. “I was thinking, when I stole that mercenary chest in Terema; ‘Haneyl will love all this...’ and then I remembered she wasn’t here. Sometimes it hits you when you least expect it, doesn’t it?”

“I... I don’t miss her at all,” Rathan insists. “I get Zanara all the time and she’s not around shouting at me or being bossy or greedy or... it’s much better without her. I just... I just miss her cooking.”

Keris gives him a Look worthy of Dulmea or Sasi. “Be honest, Rathan,” she says, moving over to wrap a hair-tendril around his shoulders. “You two might fight a lot, but you do love each other. It’s okay to miss her, even if she drives you crazy with how annoying she is when she’s here. That’s how siblings _work_.”

“How do you know that?” Rathan asks. He sounds genuinely interested.

Keris blinks. “I... Shan and Yelm and Piu?” she asks. Except no, they’re bizarrely agreeable and almost never fight, except when Piu yells at her older brothers for _still_ being overprotective despite her bout with pneumonia being two years past. “Or... growing up with R- with your father?” But that doesn’t work either. She and Rat were a team; filling each other’s weaknesses perfectly - and they definitely hadn’t been siblings. “Or... or...”

_ a big broad shouldered man, a giant of a man, with paler skin, his back turned to her, lit by the red of the forge. he turns and shouts at her, about how she’s not meant to come in here, it isn’t safe, and then sweeps her up in his arms and carries her, talking to her more gently before he leaves her with an older boy, maybe ten or so. _

Keris blinks. “... or maybe even before that,” she whispers. “I had siblings. When I was little. An older brother - or two? And I think a cousin; an older girl... or maybe she was just a friend of the family. They’d always bicker... but when my brother fell out of a tree and hurt his leg, she was the first one to go running to help him...”

((o keris. siblings getting along and not fighting or bickering = “bizarrely agreeable”.))

Rathan rises gracefully, and gives her a hug, wrapping cool long arms around her. Zanara squirms loose and barrels in from behind her. “You’re crying,” Rathan says.

“Sorry,” Keris sniffs, hugging both of them back. Rathan’s embrace is the best of all her children at calming her down, and Zanara is a sweet-scented salve that helps bring her back to the present. Literally sweet-scented in this case; he seems to grown pheromone ducts. “Being back here - back in my homeland. It’s bringing back a lot of memories.”

“I wonder what they’ll think of how we look,” Zanara says thoughtfully. He pokes Keris. “Because you’re going to let me out, right? I want to see what Creation is like! I bet there’s all kinds of fun things to paint, like mountains and trees and people.”

“I’ll be letting Rathan out first,” Keris says. “Since he’s helping me with the Plan.” She winks at Rathan, who smirks. “But if we have some time and a new moon to spare, I’ll see if we can get some painting done. And you can definitely help me come up with ideas for Lilunu’s present.”

Zanara snuggles closer. “Yay,” he mutters. “And even if Rathan isn’t missing Hanny, I am. I want more time with you because I don’t have my big sister around.”

He’s being a little too shameless there, Keris feels. “It’s Vali’s night tonight,” she reminds him. “But tomorrow I’ll spend all night painting with you, and we can think about what places to record for Lilunu in that little picture-cube, and where to get the right essence to make it work.”

Keris feels him scowl against her lower back, but he mutters “Fine.”

“And speaking of nights, I need to wake back up before I spend all day here and explain what’s going on to Kuha,” she adds. “Zanara? I think if you apologise very sincerely to Dulmea, she’ll feel better and maybe let she-you go sooner. But, uh. Do it outside the City walls, just in case.”

Zanara agrees, and Keris wakes up with a sigh. Children, eh? Just as she thinks that, one of the children in her belly starts kicking repeatedly as they shift position, and adds in some elbowing as they try to get comfortable.

“Argh,” she comments. “ _You two_. If you roughhouse like this when you’re born...” She closes her eyes to focus. The girl - Keris has tried to come up with names, but for the life of her she can’t find anything that sounds right. She suspects that just like with her other children, the names will come to her when she looks down at their chubby little faces for the first time, and there’ll be no rushing it before that point. Regardless, the girl is _definitely_ some form of shapeshifter. Being in the womb and tied up in umbilical-fronds is limiting her from changing completely, but those teeth are not remotely human, and she tastes like cat. Big cat.

“You were out for ages,” Kuha says, when she finally gets around to that talk. “So, I’m guessing you found something. And maybe stole it.”

“... not actually that far from true,” Keris says, amused. “But the thing I found was a person, and I didn’t so much steal her as make a temporary alliance. She’ll be helping us scout the valley and work out what the Lookshyians have.”

“What kind of a person? Can you trust them?”

“Not remotely,” Keris says. “But that’s fine, she doesn’t trust me either. She’s, ah...” She bites her lip thoughtfully. “She’s a Chosen of the Moon. I ran into her about two years ago during a mission that... went horribly, horribly wrong, but that wasn’t really much to do with her. We were both at an auction that about a dozen different Exalts tried to rob, we had a quick scuffle over a plate and then she ran off with it while I went to help Sasi. Now she’s here being a merchant princess and planning to rob Eshtock just like we are.”

She sighs. “The reason that mission went wrong - well, one of the reasons it went wrong - was that Sasi and I had a perfect, beautifully-thought-out plan, and it ran into the plan of a starry-eyed one who was in the city at the same time. Neither of us knew the other one was there, the plans collided, and...” Keris makes an exploding gesture with her hair. “When we ran for it, half the city was rioting and the bits that weren’t were crawling with mercenaries. So here and now? I’d rather have her on our side as a not-completely-trusted ally of convenience than doing her own thing while we try to run a high-risk assassination.”

But Kuha isn’t listening. Not really. She just gasps. “A king of the moon?” she asks, voice trembling. “There are tales about them, among my people.” She looks at Keris, voice quavering. Keris motions at her to continue. “They say that once, a hero married the moon, and he led us north and tamed the first owls and taught the arts of alchemy and made the first stick-children. In the end, he led the champions of our people to the lands of chaos, and we never heard from him again.”

Keris blinks. “... a Lunar settlement. One who... who set up your owlriders and... that’s why those giant owls are so common up there, it’s... huh. That. That makes a lot of sense, actually.” She shakes her head in wonder. “Then... yes. Yes, probably the same kind of being. Your moon king... probably went to kill off the raksha in those Wyld Zones and found they were too strong for him.”

Her eyes widen suddenly. “ _Oh!_ And he must have placed the stones that held back the fog around the hungry mountain! _How_ did I miss that? I should have seen that someone powerful had to have done that! I bet that was the one he led his champions into and never came back from.”

“The moon kings are scary. They are living legends. They walk in other skins, they break gods over their knees, and they know things that people should not,” Kuha says. She hunches over. “Will this moon king be angry with me for not being a stick child anymore, even that was my fate?”

“No. Absolutely not,” Keris snaps out, immediately moving to fold Kuha into her side. Since Kuha is still taller than she is, it looks a little ridiculous. “This moon king is from a different land; a different marriage to the moon. She’s not the same as the one who founded your people. And if she has any objection to you - any objection at all - she’ll deal with me. Remember. Your moon king went into the lands of chaos and never returned. _I did_. She said herself that she’d be a fool to cross me in battle.”

She strokes Kuha’s hair for a moment. “And you’re still an owlrider. Still fast and fierce and glorious in the air, whether it’s astride Cissidy or on the back of an owl. You may not be a stick-child anymore, but you can do all that you used to and more.”

((Per + Pres to reassure her))   
((3+5+1 Firebrand Demagogue+1 bonus+(2+1 TLA) stunt, spending a Compassion channel which due to TLA adds 4 autosux. 13 dice; 5+4=9 sux.))

Kuha is still shivering, but she takes a deep breath and settles herself down. “Yes, Kerishyra,” she says, leaning into Keris’ hand. “I trust you.”


	4. Chapter 4

The sun is high over Saha, and it’s burned away the mists from the swamp. Or, rather, most of the mists. When Keris scales one of the tall buildings, she can see that the mist is clinging to the mountains. She remembers that Orange Blossom had said that the Lookshyians had broken the ancient mist-spell, but it looks like that’s not strictly true. She eyes the places the mist is still clinging; pulling a sketchpad from her hair almost by reflex. Her hand moves across the paper; guided by the eye, roughly laying out the relative positions of what she can see. Town, fort, marsh, mountains...

It looks like rough terrain all around - for people who aren’t her, obviously. Keris can see that this town lies in the valley mouth, which rises up into the mists. The river that runs out of the valley runs around the town on both sides, surrounding it by flowing water, and from this position Keris can see that it looks like maybe, once, there was the same flow of fresh water by the causeway. There are multiple ruins on more solid islands in the wet landscape, and from this height she can see what might have been plazas or foundations in the sheep-dotted landscape near the mouth of the valley.

It’s all useful information, but nothing much more than she could have seen or guessed on her approach. She runs a hand over her bump as she looks up at the mountains, thinking about what’s up there. She’s nervous. For all that she bragged to Illana; Keris has rarely if ever faced something as deadly as a Lookshyian fort or a full brotherhood of Dragonblooded. Single peer opponents, perhaps - the yidak of Rosseah, or Lilunu ridden by the Silent Wind, or perhaps the hungry king in the Northeast...

... but two of those were wild and half-brainless and feral, and the third didn’t really want to kill her. These Lookshyians are disciplined. Trained. They’ll team up against her if they can. And... they’re _Dragonblooded_. It’s an old fear, and it runs deep.

“Did you ever feel nervous?” she asks Dulmea quietly. “Before a big job like this?”

“Fear is the life of a serf in the City,” Dulmea says. “It keeps you sharp. Even when I became a housemistress, fear was what kept me attentive to to the demands of my lord. Hold the fear close and make it your dagger hidden in your hair.”

“I’m as scared for them as me,” Keris confesses, rubbing her hand in a circle over the twins. “I can’t risk getting hit. And maybe I’m a bit scared _of_ them, too. They’ll be born soon.”

“You are the one who took this offer, knowing that you were heavily pregnant,” Dulmea reminds her, rather unsympathetically.

“I know, I know.” Keris sighs. “Fine. Fuck it. Let’s do some skulking.”

Step one is figuring out exactly where the ruins of Eshtock are. With an absolute moratorium on flying when they might be seen; a scouting trip on anyaglo-back is ruled out, so legwork it is. After some discussion, Keris leaves Kuha discreetly watching the fort from a wary distance; monitoring how much activity is going on and what the flow of people in and out is like.

Since this monitoring involves a couple of large meals at eating-houses with a good line of sight while Keris climbs up a mountain on foot, Kuha makes a few token protests but agrees.

It’s easy enough to get out. Keris is an air-and-land-coloured blur as she skips out of town and springs along the surface of the river that’s heading upstream.

However, she finds that the mists close in unnaturally quickly as she heads up the valley. She’s only a little bit past the nearest sheep when they sweep in, thick and cloying. They block every sense - conceal light, deaden touch, deafen sound.

((Cog + Survival to advance, -8 external penalty from the potent magic that’s present.))

So dense is the fog that it obscures even Keris’s hearing, and she’s reminded with a shiver of her po’s domain. Hopefully, she thinks, there aren’t any giant bitchy serpents lurking in here. She moves at a light jog; spreading her hair out around and ahead of her to try and feel her way through.

The question is, if this is happening to _her_ , how in the hells do the Lookshyians manage? Is there a special path they’ve cleared and the rest is left affected? Keris frowns. If she can’t get through the mists herself; sneaking her way up a single access route is going to be... trickier.

Keris hasn’t been this deaf for a very, very long time. Did she feel like this all the time, or is it even worse than that.

But she relies not on her senses and not on her mind, but on that little feeling of her gut that’s almost spiteful. No, she realises, she’s listening to the _snake_ , that hissing creature in her mind that is a creature of fog and obfuscation - and that maybe it can feel a way through when she can’t.

She loses track of time, but - ah, there, suddenly she broaches the fog wall. And she’s on the other side of it, in a strange grey space where there’s no sun and the grey clouds lie overhead. She’s near the top of a mountain, she thinks - even though she doesn’t think she scaled anything.

And in front of her is - she thinks - some kind of ruined homestead, made of pale brown stone. The roof fell in long ago, and the metal fence surrounding it is mere rusty spikes protruding from the ground. All the crops are dead and nothing grows here, but that means she can see the empty field here. A lost farm, perhaps. She ducks inside the walls, on the basis that more cover is never something to say no to, and tries to project gratitude in a vaguely po-wards direction as she listens. Her hearing is working again here; in this strange bounded place within the fog, and she wants a good idea of what’s in it before she advances any further.

... it actually reminds her of her inner world a little; the way the mists cocoon this place like the cloud-wall of Pekhijira. But she feels at home there, even in the furthest and wildest reaches of her empire. The atmosphere here is one of a much less friendly place.

The ruins of this Shogunate city have not seen the sun in seven hundred years. Endless fogs veil the mouldering rubble and fungus-covered skeletons. Nothing green grows there. The once-honey-coloured and once-white stone of the Shogunate structures is pitted and cracked and rotted. She can hear mushrooms growing amidst the rot, but nothing more.

She can hear that she’s up near some sort of rim, near the top of the valley. In the confusion, she must have been running up the side of the walls - and if it wasn’t for her Adorjani gifts, she might have fallen and broken her neck in the fog. There’s a wide expanse of buildings and water down in the valley below - perhaps this is Eshtock itself, and the house she found just a farmstead up on the hillsides above it.

As for life, there’s very little. In the quiet, she can hear the fifty or so humans down in the valley below very clearly indeed. Their hearts are like sirens in the quiet. They clank like steel and jadesteel, and she can hear the Lookshyian accents, even from this far away. But they’re not the only things she can hear. She can also hear the wailing of countless Dead - thousands, maybe tens of thousands, trapped in river-wrapped towers, unable to pass the flowing water.

Under normal circumstances, this would be the point at which Keris would charge in and start acting. But not today. Today, she’s nervous. Today, she has her twins to think of. Today, she’s fresh off a vicious scolding from Dulmea.

So, she thinks, aware of Dulmea being _present_ in a way she usually isn’t - not just keeping a Chord watching Keris’s activities, but devoting her full attention to her charge. What else can she do now while being as stealthy as possible? Without drawing any attention to herself, or risking discovery?

Well, she could probably use the fungus and mushroom patches as cover to slink down further towards the valley - slowly and carefully, keeping a wary ear on all of the heartbeats. And once she’s closer to them, she could work her way around to one of those rivers that trap the Dead, and slip into it - where she’ll be harder to see, and feel more at home.

And then she’d be close enough that she could listen in on some conversations, and maybe listen to the essence of anyone who sounds like they’re giving orders, and work out where her target is and how many Dragonblooded friends he has.

Yes. That sounds like a plan.

The slopes here are slick scree, worn away by rain, but Keris easily hops and skips down them. She finds very interesting skeletons along the way - ones not at all human. Indeed, they’re not skeletons really - more like... statues, or things turned to stone. She licks one of them experimentally, and tries to slide a root-tendril into it to see if it really is stone. It is - sort of. Keris thinks she recognises what these are. They’re the remains of what happens to chaos-beasts when they’re trapped too long in the world. The rainbow stains on the surrounding rocks confirm it - and now that she looks closer, these aren’t rocks. Not all of them. What Keris had assumed was a landslide is... thousands of dead wyld-beasts, turned into stone. In life, they’d have been a carpet, an army - and now that she looks at them, they seem to be facing away from the city down below.

Perhaps they were fleeing it.

She shivers. An army of wyld-beasts fled this place rather than face its defences, long ago. And she’s going towards it. As survival tactics go, it’s not the best.

On the other hand, damming up just one of those rivers will unleash enough angry Dead that the Lookshyians will be very, very preoccupied dealing with them while she makes her hit. Though of course... that might also unleash a wave of Dead on the countryside below. And killing them all herself would blow her cover, unless she waited until all the Lookshyians were gone.

Troublesome. Tamping her hair down from its worried swaying, Keris continues her careful descent towards the beating hearts of the valley’s living residents.

The dead wyld-beasts continue as far as the broken and ruined walls, and past them. One of the holes in the walls are nearly blocked by a fallen creature as big as a Malfean tower block, still lying where it fell.

And in the streets, the wyld-beast statue-things are joined by fungus-covered human skeletons. They scatter the grounds, their Shogunate crossbows and metal spears discarded or sunk into the wyld-statues, the leather straps holding on their strange white Shogunate plate armour long since rotted through to leave it lying on the ground. Are these, then, the things that the Lookshyians are here for? This armour; these weapons? Keris experimentally lifts a breastplate, weighing it against others she’s felt with a critical eye.

It’s so light that Keris almost believes it’s decorative armour for a moment. But no, it feels as strong as heavy armour. An arrow would bounce off this if it hit them in the breastplate. This particular one is heavily damaged from the hole that punches right through it and the claw marks down the front, but it’s still worth an absolute fortune - and it would probably be worth even more if it was patched up.

((Mechanically, there are two grades of armour here. There’s the military armour, which is mechanically Plate-and-Chain but with the mobility penalty and fatigue of Lamellar, and there’s the security forces armour, which is mechanically lamellar with the mobility penalty and fatigue of a breastplate. The military armour Keris is hefting is worth Resources 4 in modern Creation in its heavily damaged state.))  
((Okay yes that is actually fucking good.))

Her mind goes into a gleeful spinning daze for a moment, picturing Kuha outfitted in this - it’s light enough that she could afford some of it even on owlback, and she’d be safer for it. Dizzy with greed, she turns her attention to the weapons, barely restraining her eagerness enough to be quiet about it.

The spears seem to be not very different from a modern one, though their shafts are made of a strong and light metal. Picking one up and giving it a whirl, Keris finds it has a very nice balance, but she can’t seem to find anything special about it. It’d probably be better at blocking without the risk of someone breaking the shaft, but it’s not as major as the armour. It’d be worth more as a status symbol or to a collector than just basing it off a weapon.

((Keris figures it’s basically just a well-balanced spear. It might reach Resources 2 or 3 to someone who was more of a collector, but it’s fundamentally... a spear.))

On the other hands, the crossbows are incredible. Keris has heard of these back in Nexus - crossbows like this are the sort of things Scavenger Lords sometimes find a collection of. They’ve got a magazine of bolts that load from the top, and cunning mechanisms of clockwork that make them easier to cock. Keris finds some of their bolts - nasty little things of Shogunate metal that feel harder than steel. Unfortunately, the strings have broken on most of them, and they seem a mess.

((These shogunate crossbows are top-fed from a magazine and bolt action. They’ve also fared worse in the damp than the spears or armour, because they have moving parts on the inside. The one Keris checks is probably worth Resources 2 from its raw parts alone, but it’d be worth 3 if it was patched up to working order or 4 if provided with a supply of those nasty bolts))

Oooo yes. Yes, she likes these. She likes these a lot. While she’s technically here on a scouting mission, Keris makes sure to find a mostly-intact breastplate that she can alter to fit Kuha, a crossbow that sounds more restorable than its neighbours and as many of those wicked little bolts as she can find before moving on. Happy images of Kuha firing from bird-back flit through her mind to the tune of gleeful crooning.

((So, she’s aiming to take cover in a stream or river close to the Lookshyian camp and eavesdrop, hopefully identify her target, the commanding officers and any DBs present, then retreat.))

Rather than running in, Keris instead stalks her way through the streets. Haneyl might be with Sasi, but Haneyl can only hide herself like that because she’s that part of Keris that can do it. Keris’ hair isn’t red now - it’s the same grey-brown as whatever she’s standing against. Sometimes she moves by the rivers - sometimes she comes out and stalks down the streets.

She stalks past a Lookshyian guard who’s relieving herself on a slope that leads down into a river, and she’s past their defensive perimeter. She moves slowly. Cautiously. Even when they look directly at her, they don’t see her.

The Lookshyians themselves have set themselves up in a facility that... dammit, Keris can’t read High Realm and Shogunate script resembles High Realm more than modern Rivertongue or Firetongue or Old Realm. But it looks like a big posh building, so she’s thinking it’s probably an administrative building or where the army used to operate out of or something.

And there’s her first Dragonblood, inside the walls of the compound. She has dark skin and dark green hair, and her armour is green jade with silver trimming on her surcoat. She’s actually sort of... cute looking - big-eyed and baby-faced, and unlike some of the other soldiers she’s totally unscarred. She’s discussing something with one of the other soldiers, in the Lookshyian dialect. Keris listens carefully and has Dulmea take notes, but the accent and the references the two are making to concepts they must have learned in whatever pilfering-other-people’s-ancient-ruins school Lookshy runs make it difficult. She can’t make out most of the specialised language, but she gets a rough gist of it. They’re talking about patrols and the... the green-haired lady is telling the probably-a-mortal about how it’s only for a few more days then they’ll be getting some sunshine and spending too much time in here is bad for your health.

Mentally marking the woman as Baby Face, Keris takes stock of her essence. Green eyes flare for a moment from the patch of grey flattened against the puddle-covered road, and in that moment Keris sees that the woman is a weak little blossom. Weaker than Haneyl, and only a little stronger than some demons. Why was she ever scared of someone so _weak_ , she thinks for a moment.

((Wood essence, E4))  
((D’awww. Babby DB.))

One Dragonblood confirmed. Now for the others.

Leaving the little flowerbud behind, Keris goes looking for her stronger friends - especially those giving the orders. She needs at minimum to confirm the shozei’s presence, and get a good feel for what he looks and sounds like. Keris can see as she heads in that inside, out of the rain, they’ve got lines of salt all over the place. If she hadn’t heard the wailing ghosts, she’d know that there was something wrong here.

There’s a lot more Lookshyians in here, moving around all the time. It’s going to be far more difficult to pass unnoticed inside the building.

((Physique + Subterfuge, Diff 5, Contested roll, declare any additional Charm use she’s using to get away with her sneaky-sneaky.))

Keris slips inside with utmost care. She’s best-hidden when she’s still, and so she keeps track of all the heartbeats and footsteps nearby; moving across rooms in brief chameleonic bursts behind turned backs or during gaps of ten seconds or so when a corridor is empty enough for a silent dash. Here; in the heart of her enemy’s power, she cannot afford to be caught.

((She hasn’t turned HPC off yet, so 5+5+2 stunt+2 Amulet x2 HPC=14. 8 sux x2=16.))  
((Diff 5 reduces that to 11 net, beats 3 successes - and would have drawn and thus lost if she hadn’t been using HPC.))  
((Yikes.))

The inside of this building has clearly been cleaned up from how it once was, but the signs of long abandonment are still everywhere. It’s only the lack of sun which means that it hasn’t been torn apart by vegetation, and everything still smells of dampness and rot and mould. But they’ve cleaned it up in here and patched up the windows and it’s certainly warmer.

Still, at least they have oil lamps lit on the inside rather than having some constant Shogunate illumination, and that means that the light is dim and wavering. Keris makes full use of the shadows as she darts around and crawls along the ceiling, hanging from exposed rafters by her hair.

She finds two Dragonblooded and several mortals down in an obvious cache room or place they’ve dumped their loot. They’re wearing different clothing to the soldiers and don’t have the silver trim to their armour. Keris thinks they’re probably some kind of scholar or something, because several of them are pouring over old documents and books, carefully trying to copy out what damaged pages say, while a pair sit in the corner talking - ha! Yes, Keris can understand _that_ kind of sorcery lingo.

One of the women, the leader Keris guesses from how she’s ordering the other one around as they work on their sorcery lingo stuff, feels like weak breezes. She’s as strong as the little blossom outside. The fire next to her is still weak, but he’s stronger than her - notably so. He’s as strong as Keris’ own souls.

((The woman - Air Aspect, E4))  
((The man - Fire Aspect, E6))

Odd, Keris thinks. The weaker one is in charge, apparently? That doesn’t make much sense. You certainly wouldn’t find _Keris_ taking orders from someone so weak. Sasi doesn’t count. Keris might beat her in a fight, but where Keris can kill armies, Sasi can topple countries. And Keris has only recently grown as strong as her. Plus she has Sapphire Sorcery. And the ear of a number of Unquestionable.

Keris sighs wistfully. Gods, she misses Sasi. If only she could be here now. It would be safe, even. She’s stealthier than Keris when she wants to be, after all.

Marking the two Dragonblooded as Sorcery Woman and Sorcery Man - and the big pile of loot as Grab This When Possible - Keris retreats from the building. The tension is starting to wear on her. Hopefully she’ll find the stupid shozei soon and be able to get out of here - assuming he’s not holed up down in the fort.

... she really hopes he’s not holed up down in the fort.

Once outside the building, Keris stops to think. There are only about fifty-odd heartbeats here. That’s not too many people, really, and they’re probably split into roles. There are the perimeter guards and grunt soldiers - who Baby Face is probably in charge of. There are the occultists and sorcerer-scholars, down with Sorcery Man and Woman. Put together, that accounts for a good fraction of the warm bodies down here, and leaves the obvious third division of Command and possibly Active Looting.

There’s another Dragonblooded here who’s taking off heavy white armour when Keris finds him in the well-lit, warm and far more homey area that’s their bunks. There’s a big jade daiklaive propped against the wall. While he’s stony and while he’s stronger than the babies, he’s not _that_ strong. He’s in the room with other soldiers who are getting undressed - probably just getting off shift.

((E5, Earth Aspect))

But he doesn’t match the description of the shozei either. Keris’ hair bites itself. He’s not at the site right now. Four Dragonblooded, then. Baby Face and Sorcery Woman; as weak as some serfs. Stony Sword, slightly stronger, and Sorcery Man the strongest of all the ones here. Wood, Air, Earth and Fire. Perhaps the shozei is Water, Keris wonders. It seems like the sort of thing Lookshy might do; send out one of each element.

Regardless, there doesn’t seem to be anything else Keris can learn here - and that means that being here is a now-unnecessary risk. She’ll have to come back some other time. And, she realise with a jolt, get back to town quickly and find Kuha. If the shozei is in the fort, and Kuha is _watching_ the fort... well, logically there’s no reason she would be singled out, but that doesn’t stop Keris worrying.

... it occurs to her, belatedly, that caring so much about Kuha might make it tricky to send her out on missions with any element of danger in them. She should probably think about that. And never mention it to Kuha, who would either be hurt or offended by the notion.

“Child,” Dulmea says, a little tersely, “you know, we could have avoided running through the fog if you’d thought to scope out their fortification first. I assumed you were just making excuses to get here first to steal things that they hadn’t found yet.”

“I’m going to make the attack here,” Keris replies absently as she works her way back up towards the rim of the fog. “It’s more isolated than the town, it’s not their home-grown fort that they know every inch of, and I can use the Dead in the towers as a distraction and to make it look more like a Dead Exalt. Anyway, finding out all of the Dragonblooded who are here was important; I might wind up fighting any number of them. Though fuck, I hope I can strike at a time when some of them are off-shift and out in the sun. I don’t like the idea of fighting five of them at once... urgh. Unless this _is_ only one shift and there are five or six more down in the fort.”

She pauses, biting her lip. “Did I... did I at least do the scoping-this-place-out right?”

“You took risks that I wouldn’t have,” Dulmea says critically. “I would have scoped this place out over several days, stationing other angyalka on nearby buildings to watch everyone leaving and entering, and comprehensively recorded all occupants and their sleeping patterns. But then again, I can’t blend into the background and press myself against a wall as two people walk by. Which you did. And was very risky.

She pauses. “And from what that moon witch said, didn’t she say there were ten or so Dragonblooded in the Lookshyian team? So, yes, it’s likely that they’re rotating people in and out of here, if what you heard was correctly understood and it’s not healthy to be in here so long.”

“Oh, mother,” says the little boy Zanara, clearly squirming through a door or something from how his voice shifts as it gets louder. “Do you think they have art in here? I bet the Lookshyians aren’t interested in art.” His voice is soft, and almost lulling.

((5 successes on attempt to Compel Keris to look for art, playing off her Love of Art 4 dot principle))  
((... oooo. Argh. Dammit. Spending wp to override compulsion.))

“When I hide like that, you’d need senses like mine to notice me,” replies Keris defensively. “And... damn, yes. So I’m looking at probably five Dragonblooded at once, whenever I pick for the attack. And...”

She hesitates, looking around from the mushroom patch she’s currently settled on. Zanara’s not wrong. There is probably art here. Less than there once was, certainly, but some types will have survived - anything done in stone or metal or glass will be salvageable if it’s not shattered, and there might be sealed boxes with more perishable materials inside.

... but the place is still full of Lookshyians. And the prickles of tension on Keris’s back are now more like one gigantic spike. She wants out of here.

“They probably won’t be gathering it up, no,” she agrees, forcing herself onward. “I’ll make sure to have a good long look after I get them all out of here, okay? But for now it’s dangerous to linger here, so we need to leave.” She frowns. “Though. I think I’ll ring the edge of the mists and see if they did clear a path down the mountain that’s free of them. Bulling straight through was not fun.”

“But mama,” Zanara says, little voice heart-broken, “what if they’re breaking the art trying to find weapons or gold? What if they tear down a jade statue just to get their hands on the jade in it? And,” he sniffles, “if Hanny was here, she’d want you to save the precious solid jade statues from the Dragonblooded before they can get their hands on them!”

((Zanara, also bringing Keris’ Greed into things as well as her Love of Art.))  
((aaaargh))  
((u r evulz))

“... well...” Keris temporises, her gut doing an unpleasant and visceral lurch at the thought of a priceless Shogunate artpiece being hacked apart like... like her poor gorgeous plate that someone had probably melted down and hammered into an ugly clunking bit of armour or something. “I... I guess I could do a quick sweep to see if there’s anything _obvious_ that needs rescuing...”

“That’s good, mama,” Zanara says, voice still emotional. “I mean, I bet Hanny wouldn’t want you to take everything, but you do need to find some of the lovely things to keep safe.”

Biting her lip, Keris nods and sets out at a crawl - this time seeking different ends. At least for this she doesn’t have to go near people, and can just keep an ear out for heartbeats and avoid them when they move her way. And with thousands of Dead in the sealed towers, the Lookshyians aren’t going to be venturing in there regularly, while anything that could be broken by undead hands no doubt already was. So she could rule them out of her search too.

((Reaction + Investigation to search for ART, stunt/charms as necessary and also to establish criteria for what Keris is looking for.))  
((Okay, criteria: only “pure art” pieces that the Lookshyians are likely to break or damage for their material value, nothing below Res 4. Using PoEU to evaluate things, keeping HPC active, and... I guess Theft As Release isn’t really relevant here.))

She has to set herself a few rules. She’ll only look for things that the Lookshyians won’t be interested in. A beautiful spear might be a work of art, but it’s something they’ll collect, take down to their big pile of loot, and not damage. Nothing worth less than her earrings is worth her time either, and if it’s anywhere too close to the camp she’s not willing to risk it.

But beyond that, there’s no reason not to pick up a few knick-knacks if they’re small enough to carry easily and won’t be missed. Larger pieces aren’t worth rescuing right now, but she can tag their location and maybe discretely make them a bit less obvious.

Keris gets lucky. She feels she deserves it for once. She finds what seems to have been a ruined art gallery on the edge of the city. Even the outside was once a beautiful edifice of crystal and white stone, but it’s now streaked with dirty rain and the crystal is cracked and broken. There’s a broken obelisk out front, fallen and cracked, and the front wing is filled with stone statues of fae and what seems to have been a last barricade of soldiers who’d fought to the last.

“Oh,” Zanara says sadly. “This building was so pretty once. And there aren’t even pretty trees or plants here.”

Keris lets out a muted whimper, and strokes one of the soldiers. “You were good men,” she murmurs. “Thank you for trying to defend this place.”

Then she slinks inside, steeling herself for what the centuries will have done to the treasures here.

Keris... does not understand the art here. The art that’s survived, that is. There seems to have once been an extended wing of calligraphy displays and ink-art, but that’s only what she can conclude from the plaques. The parchments rotted off the now-bare walls.

But here! Here, there’s four faded red cubes, arranged in a circle. They don’t seem to do anything and they’re not made of red jade, but are they art or are they something else? There, on that wall, there’s the remnants of a painting that seems to have survived behind glass, but it’s just a High Realm character painted in lots of different colours many, many times. There’s strange brass cylinders stacked on top of one another, and there’s something which looks like a dragon if a dragon was made entirely out of stacked hexagonal purple crystals.

It’s all so... un-Realm like. It’s not at all like the inkworks and the calligraphy and the things Sasi likes.

“What do you think that means?” Zanara asks, wide-eyed, as Keris paces down a corridor towards a sign that says - she thinks - “Northern Carvings”.

((Lawl. It’s modern art, is what you’re saying here?))

“Which part? The sign? The cubes? The... purple crystal dragon thing?”

“All of it,” Zanara breathes. “The Realm stuff Lilunu showed she-me was really boring compared to the wonderful things she makes. It was all the same. But I think this means that there was lots more kinds of art in the Shogunate. People made new things more. They tried new things. You know, I bet the fact that there were lots more Dragonblooded around meant some of them were poor and had to just be full-time artists rather than being bags. Isn’t that amazing to think of?”

Keris can’t help but grin. “That _does_ sound amazing,” she concedes. “The Shogunate lasted... what, twelve centuries? Twenty? All that time with a bunch of Dragonblooded just being artists full-time... yeah, I can see how that might have made for more art styles. More, whatsit. Like in Nexus, where people from all over mingle.” She pokes her head into the “Northern Carvings” room, and follows when she’s sure nothing is going to collapse on her. “I think most of this stuff is fairly safe. The Lookshyians won’t care about it, but they won’t rip it up for material either. I haven’t seen any pure jade or anything, and it’s a fair clip from their camp.”

And no sooner has Keris said that, than she discovers that the “Northern Carvings” have very little in them. They have very little in them, because what the High Realm _probably_ meant was “Carving of Mela” or something akin to that. Because that’s what they have here, in the centre of the room. A marvelous carving of Mela, made from what can only be blue jade, that’s the size of one of those titanic snakes that are sometimes seen in the rivers of An Teng. It’s so intricately carved that Keris can see individual scales and each whisker on her face is a hair-thin drawn out strand of jade. It must have taken years for the dragonblooded artist who made it to carve it out.

It’s one of the most beautiful things she has ever seen.

((... how big is it? Is it bigger than her? Too big for her to nab with 4th Soul Devil Domain?))  
((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanoboa.))  
((It is, however, curled up somewhat.))  
((Godfuckingdammit))

Keris stares, dumbfounded, for what feels like hours. Though in reality it’s probably only a few dozen seconds.

Then she very quietly starts swearing.

“This is a disaster!” she hisses. “This is a _disaster!_ What do I do? Argh! Fuck! I can’t just leave it! But I can’t get it into the Domain without a giant four-hour ritual! Fuck fuck fuck fuck _fuck!_ ”

Zanara hums to himself. “Well,” he says, thoughtfully, “the ghosts probably make lots of noise at night, don’t they? What about staying around and hiding the noise with the ghosts screaming and stuff. I bet the Lookshyians won’t be as suspicious of strange lights then.”

“You could always cut it up and put it in here in pieces,” Vali says. “Simple. Fast. Much better.”

“No!” Zanara screams. “You can’t!”

“No!” Keris hisses, almost in unison with her youngest. “I can’t!”

“Just glue it back together and it’ll be fine,” Vali says, with a shrug.

“I can’t fix something like this! I can’t _create_ something like this, probably! Whoever did it was better than I was! If I damage it I won’t be able to repair it again!” Keris’s hair knots frantically, before coming to a sudden halt. Experimentally, she gets a couple of hair tendrils under the gorgeous statue and hefts, estimating its weight.

((Trying to evaluate the feat of strength needed to lift and carry it, just in case.))

Eeeh, Keris thinks, inhaling through her teeth. She can feel the weight - about three quarters of a ton. Although... hmm. It’s lighter than she thinks it should be. She sizes it up with an assessing eye and a very, very careful lick of a beautifully sculpted scale, trying to total its net worth and guess what magical effects it might have. At a guess... she isn’t sure, but the blue jade sounds like just a thin layer of individually hand-carved scales. It’s hollow, she thinks. Which indicates whatever genius made this made it from the scales like... like a giant jigsaw puzzle, slotting them together so the tension makes it solid. And her sense of value agrees with that. It’s not worth the untold fortune that it would be if it was actually solid jade. It’s just worth a very, very massive amount.

((The raw blue jade in it alone is Resources 5, the sort of thing that could beggar a king - and that’s before the artistic value is included. Perhaps there are Dynasts who could afford it, or the very richest merchants of Nexus.))  
((Okay, 3/4s of a tonne is about 1600 pounds, which is a 12-die feat of strength. Keris can do that if she Excellency boosts. If she keeps up an Excellency boost, she can probably carry it. Is it viable for her to get it up to one of the dead farmhouses near the fog rim?))  
((Hmm. Well, she just needs +2 dice, so a level 1 anima is enough to allow her to do that as a constant thing with the mote income from that. She’ll need to take care and make a successful Physique + Occult action to prepare it for travel without damaging it, Diff 4.))

Keris whimpers again at the mastery and skill that must have gone into this masterpiece. If she ever allows Sasi to see it - which she probably will, eventually, once the pounding pulse of MINE dies down a bit - her lover will be overcome with wonder. And then probably reward her for saving it from the Lookshyians. Carnally. At length.

... but first she has to save it. So. Okay. Three quarters of a tonne. She can lift half a tonne, if she strains and uses all ten limbs. If she feeds a bit of the Maker’s power into her muscles, assembles some packaging materials around it to buffer any bumps or scrapes and support some iffy-looking bits, and then risks flaring her caste mark... she might not be able to get into her Domain, but she _can_ get it up to the rim of the fog wall. And then hide it in one of the abandoned buildings out there. That’ll get it out of danger for the moment, and then later she can work out how to get it into her Domain without drawing any attention.

“Vali...” she thinks. “You and Zanara need to work together on this one. I’m going to need your help.”

With Vali’s help and an exhibition on... possibly different kinds of chains or something... Keris manages to use parchment Zanara provides to make a cradle for it. That should spread the weight out and avoid it caving in.

And then she strains. And the cradle holds.

Panting, grunting, straining, she lifts the blue jade dragon. If blue jade is associated with lightness, then that’s _lies_. This isn’t light. Not at all. Keris feels every muscle in her body and her hair straining, and the babies choose this moment to start kicking hard. She’s heavily pregnant! She shouldn’t be lifting like this - but the jade! The art!

Her body gasps for air even though she doesn’t need it. She’s right at her limit, and even then the only way to handle the weight is to break into a sprint so her legs don’t give out. But that means she can’t jolt it and she has to take to the water to get a flat running surface that avoids breaking things.

She’s sweating buckets and her face is bright red by the time she gets up to the top of the hillside. Her arms feel like they’re falling off and she’s lost an unpleasant number of hair locks that have just torn from the strain. Her entire scalp _hurts_.

Coughing, gasping and wheezing, she gets the damn thing into one of the farmhouses that has a couple of surviving walls blocking line of sight to the Lookshyian camp. She vaguely considers digging a big hole with Haneylian fire and lowering it into... but no. No. Just no.

No no no.

No. She’ll just. Lie here for a while. Beside the priceless treasure she’s rescued. And stroke her baby bump. And whisper apologies for straining herself and upsetting them. And lie here some more. And breathe.

Some indeterminable time later, Keris finds herself sinking into the flat mud. Her hair is filthy. So is her back. She considers letting it swallow her, but reluctantly concedes that it would be a really embarrassing way for a Scourge of the Silent Wind to die. Ran up a mountain, swallowed by mud. Not a good look for a tombstone. Orange Blossom would probably laugh at her.

So, too tired even to swear properly, she hauls herself upright and limps out of the ruined farmhouse. Her course is clear. She will get down the mountain, get back into Saha, take Kuha back to their room and then sleep. Then sleep some more. She might then consider the possibility of scouting the fort, but only after some more sleep.

The first step, then, is getting down the mountain.

Keris stares at the mists for a long moment.

“Fuck.”

Okay, okay... it’s not a disaster, she thinks. The Lookshyians must be getting up here somewhere. She doubts they all have mist-snakes in the backs of their minds. All she has to do is find whatever clear path they’re using, and go down it. Simple. She thinks that the sorcerers may have been talking about some kind of transfer rite or something - some kind of spell they use to punch a hole in the mists to travel in. They didn’t talk about travelling out. Maybe the mists are only there to stop people getting in?

But it’s at that moment that she hears something move in one of the other farmhouses. There’s no breathing, no heartbeats - but the floor just creaked.

Instinctively, Keris freezes; becoming a moss-covered patch of rock next to a puddle. Her hand tightens into a fist around the phantom shape of Ascending Air. Please, please, please don’t be a Lookshyian, she thinks. Please let her not have been spotted. She cannot afford to deal with a fight right now. She doesn’t have the energy.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she snarls. She really, really wants to not have to deal with this. But if that sound came from something with any semblance of a mind... she can’t risk the jade dragon being discovered.

Wearily, wishing she had better curses than ‘choleric sewer-sucking Bag-pampering cockroach”, Keris crawls with utmost stealth towards the tiny sound. The pattern moves - one creak, another one. They’re like footsteps. And there’s a faint movement of air around the footsteps, like a chill wind. The air is cold and dark and weak, a deathly unseen presence hanging in Keris’ mind. It’s small, too - not just in power, but also in size.

((Enlightenment 2, deathly essence))

Something in her relaxes slightly. Okay. Okay, so not a... a Dragonblooded who somehow noticed her making off with the statue. It might be a bound ghost, of course - Sasi mentioned something about Dragonblooded capable of necromancy. But Keris is too exhausted to think deeply into what that might mean. She just wants to get out of here.

((Diff to stalk the ghost for a little while to see what it’s doing, then pouncemurder it?))  
((Oh, low, low. Diff 2.))  
((... yeah, honestly, just gonna use 2 Adorjani ExSux to autopass that.))  
((Uh uh. There’s an issue with that, as it turns out.))

Still conscious of Dulmea, she makes a cursory attempt at stalking it to determine if it might be bound and on a mission or just haunting the townhouse, but tension and tiredness render her patience short. A quick slide through a ruined doorway, and up into the rafters, and she’s ready to-

It’s a child. The ghost is the ghost of a young girl, perhaps only five or so, dragging an worn spectral doll by one arm. She’s dressed in faded greens, and has a doll-like china mask covering her features. The faded green of her archaic dress is marred by a big pair of three stains that run across her chest, looking like claw-marks and revealing dark flesh and bone beneath.

Keris freezes, even before Calesco wails “No!” in her head.

((Compassion required to suppress to go through with the killing))  
((... craaaap.))

Ascending Air drops soundlessly back into her panoply as Keris makes a tiny, gasping, choked noise. She can’t... she can’t just... she can’t.

She can’t.

The ghost just ambles on, dragging her doll behind her like... like she must have been doing for a very long time. Walking these halls endlessly, for seven hundred years and more. Keris bites her fist, tears coming to her eyes at the vivid image. It’s not fair, that a little girl like this should be consigned to centuries of loneliness. She should be set free to reincarnate and begin anew. Not be trapped like this in the place where she died.

After taking a few seconds to compose herself, Keris drops out of the rafters and kneels down, clearing her throat as the girl reaches the end of the hall. Her Amulet shifts and reforms around her, settling into a modest pale green dress in one of the Shogunate styles the Asarin likes. The ghost-girl whirls and gasps, a hollow rasp of air from behind her mask that comes from the claw-marks across her chest as much as from whatever mouth is behind the mask. She jumps away, falling over backwards, and then scrambles to hide behind the turn in the corridor. A few moments later, a little mask pokes its face around the corner.

Keris stays kneeling in the corridor, her hair gathered behind her. Slowly, without any sudden movements, she lifts a hand and makes a beckoning motion.

“Come out, little one,” she says in Rivertongue, hoping against hope that the language hasn’t changed too much since this girl’s time. “I won’t hurt you, I promise. What’s your name?”

“You’re... talking to me. And you’re alive,” the girl says softly. Her accent is thick and strange and a bit High Realm-y, but Keris recognises the Tairan accent in among the mix of things. “Have you seen my mummy and daddy?”

“I’m afraid not, sweetheart,” Keris says, her heart wrenching miserably. “Come on out, now. Do you want to show me your doll? She’s very pretty.”

“I haven’t seen a person who’s alive in a very long time,” the girl says, still hanging back. “Not since the monsters came. My big brother and sister didn’t see any either, before they went away. Have you seen them either? Did you come with the bell noise?”

“The bell noise?” Keris asks. “And no, I haven’t seen them either. I’m sorry.”

“Oh. I don’t know where they went. They used to be here, but then they went away. Just like the other boys and girls across the road. Mama said that I had to stay here and stay hidden until she was back. I don’t know why she’s taking so long.” The little girl takes a nervous step forwards. “Are you sure you didn’t come in with the bell noise? I remember it because it never happened before. I don’t think it did. But it’s happened a lot recently. Lots and lots. It’s very loud. There’s a big bell noise and once I saw that the clouds were being all strange when the bell happened and I think I saw the glowy-ness that the pretty people in the cinema who are dragons do, but they were a very long way away.”

“Ahh. The breaking of the mists.” Keris nods. “Then yes, I suppose I did come in with the bell noise. Or rather, the bell noise was what let me come in.” She hesitates, a sick dread forming in her gut. “Sweetheart... do you know how long you’ve been here?”

There’s no expression with the mask in the way, but Keris thinks the girl is frowning hard. “Noooooo,” she says, slowly, “but I think it’s a long time. All our bodies are all bones and have been for a long time. I make sure they’re all kept safe, in case mama and daddy want to see them when they come back.”

Silence hangs in the air for a while as Keris... processes that.

... at least... at least she won’t have to explain to the little girl that she’s dead. That was a nightmare she really wasn’t looking forward to. But she will have to tell her...

“You’re crying,” the girl says suddenly. Raising a hand to her face, Keris finds tears trickling down her cheeks. She attempts a watery smile through them.

“I’m pregnant,” she replies, motioning to the bump. “It’s making me cry a lot lately, especially at sad things. Sweetheart... I think I might know where your mama and daddy and all the other boys and girls went.”

The girl rushes up, bouncing up and down as she positively vibrates with excitement. “You do?” she asks. “You do you do you do? Tell me! You have to tell me!”

Keris bites her lip. Hard. “Okay, I will, just... sit down, okay?” The girl does, and Keris takes a deep breath. “Okay. Um. You... you know that you’re a ghost, yes? And your mama and daddy and the other boys and girls all were, too? Since the monsters came, and you all...”

“No!” The girl’s words are a violent explosion, and louder than they should be. “They’re not dead! They went away and told us to hide in the basement and they’d be back when it was safe! So I’m waiting! Because I’m a good girl!”

Keris flinches. “You’re a wonderful girl, sweetheart. You’ve been very good. But, um. You said your bodies were all bones.”

“Yes!” The girl considers. “Well, not all of us had bones. Some of the others got eaten up.”

“... that... usually means that a person is dead,” Keris prompts. A hiccuping sob escapes. “I’m sorry, I’m really... _really_ sorry. But...” She bites her lip, and decides to get it out in one rush. “But I don’t think your family would leave a sweet little girl like you all alone, and if they’re all bones then they’ve probably... gone on. To Lethe. And that’s not your fault or their fault and you’ve been so good and you don’t deserve this and I am _so sorry_.”

She takes in a ragged breath. For all that there’s no threat here, it’s every bit as harrowing as sneaking around the Dragonblooded in the valley below, and Keris is approaching the point of wanting to curl up somewhere in a miserable ball and never wake up.

((Per + Pres as Keris is trying to coax her into having a useful reaction rather than a not useful one))  
((Indeed. 3+5+2 Eternal Matriarch+2 stunt+4 Adorjani ExD {inevitability that bad things happen, crucible of tragedy, let go of attachments}=16. Enhanced by Beauty-Over-Truth so that ghost-girl doesn’t blame the messenger and push Keris into a full-scale sobbing meltdown. 8 sux.))

The ghost-girl slumps down. Her shoulders sag. “No,” she says. “No. No no no.” Her body shakes with heavy sobs. “No. They can’t be dead! They said they’d come get me! They said they would! They promised! They wouldn’t lie! Mama and Daddy are coming for me and they promised and they... they can’t have been lying but... but it’s been such a long time and... and...”

She’s standing there alone, so small and alone and cold, sobbing.

“They promised. They promised,” she whispers. “They promised they’d be back and... and I’ve been waiting for them for so long.”

Keris moves forward to fold her into a hug. “They didn’t lie, honey,” she whispers. “Sometimes... sometimes gh-ghosts slip into Lethe naturally. They meant to come back for you. I promise you, they did. They just got pulled on before they could. To... to reincarnate, you know?” She takes a stuttering breath as more tears soak the floor. “My past life was called Yamal. He didn’t want to leave his kids, either. But he didn’t have a choice about it; he... he got caught in a big attack like you and your family did. And he was born again as me, and I wouldn’t know anything about him if I hadn’t stumbled over his tomb and unearthed his memories.”

She bows her head over the little spectral shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“No. No. No,” the girl sobs into her shoulder, a cold and damp shape. “No. I want them. I want them back!” She wraps her arms around Keris. “You’re all warm but you’re not them!”

“I know,” Keris breathes, defeated. “I _know_. I lost my family too.” She gulps. “Sweetheart... I... you...”

It hurts to even think of saying it. Squeezing her eyes shut, she forces the words out anyway. “Maybe... maybe you should follow them. They c-can’t come back. But you can go on. Away from... from this cold, lonely place.”

“No,” the little ghost-girl whispers. “No. They promised me that we’d do things. We’d go on holiday. They said they’d come back and we’d go new places and... and everything would be better and we wouldn’t be hungry and the monsters would be gone. I’ve been waiting for that so long. It’s been grey and since everyone went away there’s been no-one to be my friends and... and I don’t want to go away.”

Keris swallows. “What if I took you outside, then? Out of the mists. So you could see the sky again, and weren’t stuck here.”

The little ghost-girl takes a breath. “Y-you’re nice,” she said. “M-maybe you’re wrong. They might be still out there! B-but maybe you can help me find them?”

“Okay, honey,” Keris sighs, a pained smile showing through her tears. “We’ll try. And... my name is Keris. If you want to use it.”

“... really?” the little girl asks. “Really really? I’m Kerisa! Kerisa Iyamadohkt.”

((...))  
((Okay, that was just _unnecessarily_ brutal.))  
(( : D ))

A startled gasp of laughter escapes Keris. “Really,” she confirms. “Keris Dulmeadokht - Kerisi in your dialect, I suppose. I’m honoured to meet you, Kerisa.” She rises to her feet, and holds out a hand. “Come on. Do you want me to bring your bones?”

“I... I think so,” little Kerisa says. “I can’t go very far away from them. I tried to, to see if mama and daddy were outside once because I thought I heard them, but I couldn’t go past the gates.”

“Alright then,” says Keris gently. “Show me.”

Down the rotting hallways and down dank stairs Keris goes, down into the soggy, half-caved in basement. There are several little skeletons down here, and clearly Kerisa’s been keeping them somewhat clean. They lie, stretched out on the earth, kept clean of the fungus that gives a greenish glow to the basement. There’s the littlest one, chest caved in, half a slightly taller one and a slightly bigger one missing its head. Keris takes in the scene with the eye of an experienced fighter, piecing together the positions of the bodies. She traces the bones, opening tiny mouths on her fingertips to taste them as she pays her respects. The place where the ceiling collapsed in - it must be where the wyld-beasts dug them out. They dug into the basement where the children were hiding. And the children all died.

“Rakssshhha,” she hisses, drawing the word out and baring her teeth. “ _Monsters_.”

Clenching her jaw, she pushes the furious presence of... several of her souls, honestly, further back from her awareness, and gathers the bones up as gently as possible.

“Alright, Kerisa. Let’s leave this place.”

The sun has set, and it’s dark. The green-blue light of the phosphorescent mushrooms is the only light here. It’s so dark outside that Keris thinks she might be underground. There’s no stars, no moon, no light from the sky at all. Just the distant light of the Lookshyian camp down in the city.

((... I don’t think you specified; does this place count as a shadowland?))  
((It does not. Maybe it once did, but if so, it’s healed since then - but the Lands of the Dead are not too far away.))

Keris leads the little ghost who bears her name by the hand, up from the ruined farmhouse, up the rim of the valley, up towards the line of the mists.

“The mists around the valley stop people from coming in here,” she says. “I don’t know if they stop people leaving, but just in case, hold tight to my hand, okay? I’ll carry you if need be.” And pay for it tomorrow, she doesn’t say. Her body _aches_. But she has a child to look after.

“Okay,” Kerisa says nervously, wrapping her cold, bony hand around Keris’ hand. Her flesh is squishy and unhealthy feeling.

((Keris can enter the mists. It’s still hard to get out, but she only has an external penalty of -4 to try to get out, rather than -8.))  
((Haha! This time they’re trying to keep me _in!_ Vali to the rescue! 3+3+2 stunt x2 CCC=8. 4x2= 8 sux.))

The mists close in around them like before, but this time... it’s easier. Maybe they don’t cling as hard to things trying to leave, maybe Keris has experience at navigating them now. Maybe she’s just too fucking tired for their shit. Whatever the reason, she’s able to punch her way out with Kerisa’s fingers held firmly in one hand and her gathered bones held secure in the other. It’s night outside the mists, and it... it feels better. It feels a lot better. The air feels much less _stale_ , Keris realises, and the fraction of moon overhead feels refreshing. Kerisa doesn’t like the moon, though. She shrinks behind Keris’ shadow, and tries to avoid looking at it.

Sympathetic to her plight, Keris guides her into the shelter of an overhang.

“So,” she says once they’re settled. “This is Creation now. I, uh... I didn’t get the chance to tell you, but it’s been almost eight hundred years since the monsters attacked your home. Technically, you’re older than me.”

Kerisa looks up at Keris, not really understanding. “Eight hundred years,” she says dully. “Eight hundred years.”

Keris nods sadly. “I think the... the greyness, in there? It made you not notice the years passing.” She gives Kerisa’s hand a little squeeze. “I know I keep saying it, but I’m sorry. I wish I could help you more.”

“They’re out there. They must be. You’re wrong. They promised they’d be back so they’ll be back, but they probably just forgot where our house was because it’s been so long,” the little girl insists from behind her mask.

Keris squeezes her eyes shut and feels awful. Kerisa doesn’t seem to understand - Keris isn’t sure she _can_ understand - that her parents aren’t coming back. They’ve probably reincarnated, lived full lives and died again since she lost them. But how to explain that to a little girl? A little girl so stubborn in her attachments that she’s clung to them for seven centuries, no less. If she’d had the chance to grow up, she’d have been incredible. As it is, she’s stuck - too strong to fall apart but unwilling to go on.

“Don’t feel bad,” Calesco says, with unusual tenderness inside Keris’ head. “You did the right thing. Killing her would have been wrong. And she’s so small and lost and alone, and she’s still a child even if she’s old from being dead. At least if she’s following you around, she’ll get to see new things.”

Keris groans quietly. Put like that...

“Alright,” she sighs. “If you’re sticking with me, we better get back to Saha before sunrise. And also work out how to get you across the walls.”


	5. Chapter 5

Ghost-girl happily riding piggyback, Keris makes her way back to her uncomfortable and none-too-nice-smelling rented room. Kuha is there, and looking antsy. She’s not asleep despite the early hour of the morning.

“Where were you, Kerishyra?” she demands, voice slightly harsh. “You’ve nearly been gone for a whole day.”

((... is Kuha enlightened enough to... no, she probably isn’t.))

“Yeah,” says Keris. She’s tired, her muscles are still aching from that statue, and the sustained emotional stress hasn’t left her feeling particularly forgiving. “I was busy cutting my way through ancient Sorcerous protections and carrying out _two_ rescues from under Lookshy’s nose. Excuse me if I took my time.”

She deposits Kerisa on the bed and prods her gently with a hair-tendril. “My friend’s safe; I saved her like I saved you. If you can show yourself to her, do.”

Kerisa frowns, the edge of her face crinkling up from under the mask that covers her features. “You mean she can’t see me?” she asks in her strange-accented language. “But you can, and everyone else could.”

“Me and everyone else are special,” Keris tells her. “Kuha; how did your day go? Watching the fort?”

Kuha pulls a face. “I don’t like the people here,” she says. “They’re boring. They don’t trust me because my accent is not like theirs. And the weather here makes me nervous. It’s too much like frozen fog. But,” she rubs her eyes, and rummages for her notes, that she writes in a personal shorthand of her native language padded out with Old Realm, “I got some things.”

((Roll me 6 dice))   
((5 sux))   
((... really? Huh))

“There are about thirty Lookshy-men in that big stone home. That is much less than there is room for, so I think they have either taken casualties or they have a large element on extended patrol. Their clan colour is silver. I couldn’t tell what they were saying when they talk to each other most of the time, because they speak too quickly and use strange words that you have not taught me”

She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Of the locals, some like the Lookshy-men, but I think many do not. They avoid them in the street, and they stop their children going near them. The ones who like the Lookshy-men are better dressed, and some of them wear the same badge as the flag that flies above the big stone building in the centre of town. The Lookshy-men do not walk alone through the town - they always move in at least pairs.” She yawns. “I have quite a lot of notes, Kerishyra. Do you want anything more specific?”

Keris beams with pride. “I knew I could count on you. You’re right about the patrol; there’s a shift up in Eshtock. Did you see any Dragonblooded? They’d be wearing better armour - probably coloured jadesteel like Ascending Air’s hilts - and they might be marked by the elements in how they look.”

Kuha flicks through her notes. “In the mid afternoon, four people in different armour - that is, they were all different from one another - escorted by five in the standard armour left the big stone house and headed to the centre of town. I think the leader was the man in the most fancy armour, which was black with a flag attached to the back which was silver. He had a moustache, and something dark covering one of his eyes - the right one. I did not follow them because I was worried they would notice me with so many people to keep watch.”

This level of detail earns her an exuberant hug and a brief spin. “Brilliant!” Keris cheers. “Perfect. That must be the shozei. And that makes eight Dragonblooded here at least - there might be two back at the fort if they sent two of each Dragon. Well _done_ , Kuha. This is wonderful.”

She turns her attention back to Kerisa. “As for you; I have a friend you can play with. His name is Rounen. He’s not a human; he’s a little plant-and-fire spirit who likes telling stories. You can tell him yours and he’ll write it down for you, if you want. But stay in the room while you’re here, or else those people I was asking Kuha about will want to hurt you.”

“But what about finding mama and daddy?” Kerisa asks reasonably. “I can’t find them if I’m in here.”

“You can’t find them if you’re running away from scary women who can make fire or lightning, either,” Keris points out. “And... if you tell Rounen all about your mama and daddy, me and my friends will know who we should be looking for.”

“Well, fine,” Kerisa says, pouting slightly. “But why would the Dragonblooded want to hurt me? They’re the heroes in the stories and in the cinema and things like that! And Daddy said that they’d save us all! I mean, they didn’t manage to save me, but they must’ve stopped all the scary monsters.”

((Just to be clear; she refuses to accept her parents are dead, but she knows that she’s separate from her bones and that she’s a ghost?))   
((Yes, essentially.))

Keris’s shoulders slump. “They did, eventually,” she says sadly. “But the moon didn’t hurt you before, did it? It’s been a long time, and the Dragonblooded of this Age... they aren’t friendly with ghosts, sweetheart.”

Kuha lets out a shriek, shuffling back on the bed until her back is against the wall. Her eyes dart around nervously, and even her hair seems to be twitching from fear. “Ghost?” she whispers. “Where? Y-you’re talking to a cursed one?”

“But why not?” Kerisa asks reasonably. “They’re the good guys, and I’m not a bad person. They might know where my parents are!”

With a loud growl of frustration, Keris hauls Kuha over to her with her hair. “Kuha; she’s a five-year old girl who was killed by _fae_ ,” she spits the word, “and clung onto her farmstead to guard her bones and the bones of her family and friends. If there’s a curse here; it’s the kind inflicted on her by an unfair world. She’s nothing to be frightened of, and I got her out of that sick, fog-bound place because she deserved better than being trapped there forever.”

She turns. “And Kerisa, I _know_ you want to go looking for your mama and daddy, and I know that in your day the Dragonblooded... guarded Creation, but it’s been a long, long time since then. Those monsters that came and the sickness that came with them; they devastated the whole world. Things are very different now, and you will be in danger if you go off on your own. I’ll help you look when I can, but I have duties of my own that need doing.”

“And _both_ of you,” she finishes, “I am _tired_ and _stressed_ and _pregnant_ and my arms and my hair hurt from rescuing that dragon and I have listened to _way_ too many horrible Contagion-yidak screaming up in Eshtock, so calm down for an hour or two while I have a b-”

There’s a pause.

“... right,” Keris sighs, cooling down and sagging. “No decent baths in this place. Of course not. That would mean I was staying somewhere nice.”

((Roll me 11 dice.))   
((... do I get to know what for?))   
((Rounen))   
((... only 3 sux. Alas. Kuha stole his luck.))

Keris grabs what sleep she can, but she’s tired, cranky and exhausted in the morning. Her muscles ache and worse, her hair smells like the rot and mist in that choked dead city.

At least Kerisa seems to tolerate Rounen when she gets over her initial shyness. She’s still scared of the fact that he’s on fire, but at long as he stays on the other side of the room and tells her stories, she’s content. The fact that he can make little animated dolls from the suspicious moss growing near the window on the wall also amuses her. Settling down on the bed for some late morning planning after a well-deserved lie-in, Keris has Rounen take down her notes on the Dragonblooded she’s already seen, as well as Kuha’s notes on the four in the fort. She can scope them out this afternoon.

“I’ll want to work out how often the shift changes as well,” she muses, brushing her hair out with an oiled comb. It’s not as good as a proper wash with her alchemical shampoos, but the scented oil will cover the musk of Eshtock, and it makes it feel less tacky and horrible in the bargain. “I want to catch the shozei while he’s up there; assuming he goes. I can probably do that by asking around in the town. Kuha; tonight after nightfall I want you and Cissidy to tour the nearby valleys and look for any other nearby camps - or signs of any free-roaming Dead. They have running water around this town; it’s probably for a reason. Kerisa...”

She looks at the little ghost, assessing.

“... you can come with me while I’m looking around the town, at least. Do you think you can hide in my hair if I wear it down?”

The little girl huddles in on herself. “You can’t make me go outside,” she moans. “I can feel it. The sunlight is bad! It’s evil! It’ll hurt! It’s bad enough in here with the light coming in through the shutters!” She looks up with something which was probably meant to be a puppy-dog stare, were it not for the fact that by all indications she doesn’t have any eyes under her mask. “C-can you just find if there’s a cellar or something? Or dig a hole and put my bones in there. I can rest there until it’s dark again.”

“That’s a no on the hiding in my hair, then,” Keris mutters. “Okay, I can make you a nice thick box with a pretty cushion in it, and you can arrange your bones until you’re happy and then rest inside? It’ll be nice and dark inside so the light can’t get in. Sun or moon.”

Kerisa nods violently. Then she tilts her head. “It’s like I’m the wife of a daimyo, having her own skycraft,” she says, happily. “Or flying pagoda.”

The first iteration of Kerisa’s box is wooden, since Keris can work it quickly and without any tools. She pulls a couple of empty lockboxes from her Domain, long-since divested of their contents, and spends a productive half-hour fusing and adjusting them into a thick-walled container large enough for a child’s packed bones and inset with carvings of protection and safety. Several sets of the nicer clothes she’s picked up get unpicked and rewoven into an embroidered cushion to sit inside.

((Yay, Forged In Fury and Flesh-Weaving Tendrils~))

Then she sets out for some more information-gathering. First up is the shift changes. That’s simple enough. A few subtle questions while veiled under Rathan’s innocence should be all it takes.

Veiled under a shadow-disguise that... honestly doesn’t need to change much, but which she puts on anyway to be mindful of Dulmea, Keris slips into a few tea houses until she finds a group of wall-guards. Then it’s just a matter of buying them a round to get into the conversation and gently guiding it to the Lookshyians and how often they visit that cursed valley they’re here for.

((LSD and Beauty Over Truth.))   
((Per + Pres, Diff 2, +1 equipment bonus for the drinks.))   
((3+5+2 stunt+3 Silver Willow Style+1 bonus=14. Jesus, 3 sux _again?_ Yikes.))

It’s hard to find the right person. It seems to Keris that the guards really aren’t paying much attention to the Lookshyians, perhaps deliberately. It’s like they realise that paying too much attention will get someone going “What’re you looking at?” and the naib’s men here are a scruffy lot, more there to keep him safe from insiders than fend off attackers.

Still, in a teahouse called the Handful of Violets, Keris finds some half-drunk enforcers who are already deep in their cups and low in their pockets. Someone who shows up offering to buy a round is all of a sudden their bestest-best friend, even if they’re none-too-clean smelling and their answers are slurred.

“So, you see,” Rahmad - the most sober of them, which isn’t saying much - says, “every... ‘scuse me, every few weeks, they got a big thing where they have a lotta stuff come down from the mountain, an’ an’ an’ then it goes out in these carts with whole lotta men. And then that’s when more of the stuff goes back out, you see. Lotta stuff comes out, men go in, men come out with more stuff. “ He blinks owlishly. “That’s how it all works.”

“Sounds tough on you,” Keris commiserates sympathetically. “When was the last lot?”

“Few weeks ago,” he says. He blinks. “How’d... are you not from ‘round here? Ev’ry body knows that.”

“I was holed up under piles of work,” Keris dismisses blithely. “Barely knew whether it was day or night. I bet you know how it is, with how hard you work.” She sets another drink in front of him. “Here, have another.”

They’re drinking watery rice wine here, probably made from local marsh rice. Keris doesn’t much like the taste of it - as someone who was poor in Nexus, she knows exactly what that kind of swill is like. And life in Hell has only increased her determination to avoid drinking awful watered down rice wine if she can avoid it. But the men here don’t seem to care.

“Than’ you,” he slurs. “Ever’one knows the damn Lookshyians are runnin’ the town now. Or at least anything the naib does goes through ‘em. My own clan actin’ like this. It’s ridiculush.”

Keris makes appropriate noises of agreement and fades into the background; leaving him to it. He’s unlikely to even remember the conversation tomorrow morning - and if he does, Rathan’s help will have made him think of it simply as one hard-worked citizen sympathising with another.

Now, then.

The fort.

For once, Keris elects not to take to the rooftops. Instead, she wanders fortwards to a teahouse near the one Kuha was observing from, and considers the structure of the Lookshyian base.

((Tactical assessment of the fort’s vulnerabilities.))   
((Cog + Command, Diff 4))   
((Not Subterfuge for the sneaking in?))   
((You’re asking for its vulnerabilities, I thought. I gave you the dicepool for a look at its military vulnerabilities.))   
((Fair enough. 3+0+3 Prince of Hell+2 stunt+3 Malfeas ExD {crush, collateral damage}=11. Keris is, sigh. Considering the fort with very much the eye of one who’s used to smashing stationary targets when she attacks them. Bah. 3 sux _again?_ What, do I have a dice fairy obsessed with the number three, or something?))   
((Seriously, that’s three 3s in a row. On high dicepools, no less.))

After ghosting her way around the exterior quarter, Keris sucks a breath in. This is a serious opponent here. A very unfair one. Not only have they got high, solid walls with good lines of sight, but they’ve also demolished buildings all around it in the burned out quarter so there’s lots of empty space. The walls look like they’ve grown out of the ground, rather than being built - sorcery or Dragonblooded magic, no doubt - and the exterior wall is shaped like a five pointed star, so there aren’t even any blind spots near the base of the wall. And - most unfairly! - all the guards can see each other!

Yeah, Keris thinks. Her best bet here is - _sigh_ \- to stick around outside and wait for the Dragonblooded to come out again like Kuha saw yesterday. Well, at least she can rest while she waits. And get some hand-embroidery done. And eat. And in fact... yes, she can bring Kuha with her, and spend some time helping her with her accent and teaching her some basic Firetongue.

The Dragonblooded don’t make an appearance today. There’s just the periodic shift changes of the Lookshyian soldiers - like the woman who was at the gate, Keris remembers. By the end of the day, she’s feeling even tetchier. Illana had said a week, she thinks. She’s used two days. A few more won’t kill her - and Kuha is making good progress. Or... at least Keris thinks she is. She’s never really taught anyone before. Well, nobody human and mortal. If she thinks of this as... as a time-off break to relax before the kill, that helps.

Because the kill is going to come soon. It can’t be long until the next shift change - and with only a few Dragonblooded here, she’s fairly sure that the shozei will be going up to Eshtock when it happens. The break in pattern as they settle in will be a good time to make her strike.

She could try to break into the fort, of course. Pit her stealth against those intricately-planned lines of sight, or disguise herself as a guard and sneak in. But Keris remembers Agenete. She’s not willing to put herself on Lookshyian soil with stone walls all around. Not until she’s desperate.

((Using these few days to learn Instructions From Mother by tutoring Kuha in her Rivertongue accent - which won’t be IFT teaching since she’s in the process of learning the Charm, but is just mundane practice.))   
((Oh, like, Keris is fully aware that with how few Lookshyians are actually here, there has to be a time of day that she can get in over the walls. Remember, she can reroll on another day if she takes a -1 penalty to re-evaluate the defences if she doesn’t want to go in blind.))   
((I know. But this genuinely is a narratively appropriate opportunity to learn IFT. And she’s tired and achey and a bit spooked about getting into a situation where there are multiple DBs between her and an exit again. Taking a couple more days to feel like she’s got a good grasp on “teaching people stuff” leaves her with a window of two days before Illana said to meet and share information if they haven’t come out by then.))

It’s on the third day of waiting and watching when the small, well-guarded fortified gate of the Lookshyian compound opens. Keris knew this was happening in advance, of course, because she heard the tramp of armoured feet long beforehand. They’re heading towards the naib’s residence in the centre of town.

Keris gets a good look at the Dragonblooded - and specifically the shozei. The black-armoured man tastes of the deep sea, and he’s as powerful as one of her souls. His hair is deep blue, but greying at the tips, and his craggy features almost bring to mind a wave-wracked coast. He has a fine waxed moustache, and his right eye has some kind of jade lens covering it. It might just be for his sight, but it might be for some other kind of purpose.

((E6, Water aspected))

And he watches the area like a veteran. He’s like some kind of stalking cat how he never relaxes. He’s treating the entire area as hostile territory, and Keris’ acute hearing picks up his rude remarks about the town - and the naib. He doesn’t like either, and he thinks the naib is a fool and a swamp-dwelling barbarian. And he can’t wait to get back to Lookshy to claim credit for his finds.

Then his eyes dart over to the window in the teahouse Keris is watching from, and she feels a prickle of essence on her skin. It seems to be coming from the jade eyepiece.

((Charm roll off - roll Enlightenment + Subterfuge for Keris))   
((Eeek. Please no 3 sux this time. 9+5 = 14. _Phew_. 12 sux.))   
((7 successes from him, lol. Just as well you rolled well for once.))

He looks away, his gaze continuing along. Keris can feel the hair on the back of her arms standing up, and she’s having to sit on her own hair to stop it writhing in concern.

What the fuck was that? Some kind of eye-sensor? Did he find that in Eshtock? Keris feels alarmingly sure that if she hadn’t been so far away, he might even have seen through her false-shadow disguise.

As soon as he’s out of sight, she abandons her lesson for the day and drags Kuha back to their room, where she sits and frets for a few minutes. Hell and the Makers, that was close. She’s going to have to get that thing off him in her first strike, up in Eshtock. And steal it for herself. Or maybe let Kuha use it.

... wait. Shit. Illana. If he sees _her_ , he might realise she’s a Lunar. That would... well, it _might_ not blow Keris’s cover. But it would certainly be a nasty wrench in the idea of it being Thorns alone who orchestrated the shozei’s murder. But Keris doesn’t have an easy way to contact the woman... urgh. She’ll probably be with her caravan in the marketplace. That means going out again.

“That was definitely the shozei,” she tells Kuha. “He has some sort of magical eyepiece; something that lets him... lets him see the nature of things he looks at. If I hadn’t been disguised so well he’d have recognised me for what I am.” She bites her lip. “If he looks at you from a close enough distance, he might notice the changes I made to you. Stay inside and out of sight - I need to go and warn Illana.”

Keris makes haste to the market, throwing the occasional glance over her shoulder and keeping her ears open for the clank of jadesteel. She doesn’t intend to so much as meet line of sight to the shozei if she can possibly avoid it. She darts along the back streets, narrowly avoiding a cart crash which has spilt barrels of plum wine which pools in purple splodges on the wet streets. Pausing for a moment to adjust her clothing and appearance and calm herself down, she walks calmly and purposefully and only waddles a little bit because of the way that her stupid babies contrive to get in the way when she’s not sprinting.

Illana is conversing with a merchant when Keris arrives, talking about the sales of a certain kind of lavender which apparently grows up on the hillsides that she’s interested in buying. It’s happening behind closed doors, but it’s not in her special caravan so Keris can just trivially listen in.

It’s very boring.

Gritting her teeth, Keris endures the tedium with many discreet glances around. The city suddenly feels disturbingly unsafe, with a man like that in it. She shivers, doubly glad that she’d talked Kerisa out of going near the fort for the moment.

It’s when she’s waiting that Keris hears a distinct twang of the Lookshyian accent from elsewhere in the babble of voices in the marketplace. But that’s the thing. It’s not a consistent thing, and she can’t hear any of the clanking armour here, just the much softer jingle of the local troops in their chainmail. She bites her lip. Guards here. That’s unsettling. Pulling her hood down a little further, she nonchalantly strolls towards the sounds; probing ahead by sound before advancing past each new piece of artfully lined-up cover. It takes her a few minutes to track down the Lookshyian twang, in among the voices of the merchants, but she finds that it’s coming from a well-dressed shop-owner on the edge of the market whose board advertises in big purple letters “SALT IMPORT TRADE”. He doesn’t speak like a local, and his Tairan accent is quite good - but he slips sometimes.

Keris eyes him suspiciously. If he were a Lookshyian trader, he wouldn’t have any reason to hide his accent. If he’s trying... that probably means he’s a spy.

She heads back to Illana. Either the woman will be done by now, or Keris will have to barge in and invent an excuse.

“Keris,” Dulmea chides her. “Really? Go look for something to buy if you can’t wait until your contact is ready to meet you. Leave a note and wait for her.”

Keris stops a few metres away from the door of the caravan Illana is... urgh, _still_ having a boring meeting in, closes her eyes, and tenses every muscle from her toes to her scalp and back in an up-and-down-again wave.

‘I don’t like that the shozei can see us with a close look and a bad day on our part,’ she mutters. ‘I don’t like that there’s a Lookshyian plant in the marketplace, maybe to watch her if she’s already been seen. I don’t like that they’ve already pried a bunch of Shogunate treasures out of that place that can do who-knows-what. I don’t like working blind and not even knowing if my ally is as well.’

She bares her teeth in a quiet hiss. ‘Fine. Fine, I’ll wait. But fuck buying; spending money will only stress me out more.’

Penning a quick note, she leaves it for Illana - her friend Keris has found the exotic dyes she was looking for, but they need to meet very soon somewhere quiet to work out how to harvest them - and retires to lurk near the special caravan and wait. A length or two of silver wire gets subjected to merciless treatment as she takes out some of her tension on bending it into a little ancestor-honouring charm for Kerisa.

Echo points out in her head that Keris is being a silly grump and who said looking for something to buy involved paying for something? That, she explains with a flick of her hair, is also known as ‘casing a joint’ and then Keris can argue a five finger discount.

Then Echo gets chased from the observation room by Dulmea, who’s viciously wielding a broom.

Eventually - eventually, a whole half hour later! - Illana is done, having bargained the man down to a level where he’s probably making almost no money from the deal.

Keris meets her, and is quickly and quietly taken to the special caravan.

“Please don’t spill wine again,” the other woman says dryly. “It took me ages to get the stain out. I thought we agreed to meet later.”

“We did,” Keris agrees. “But I wanted to check that you knew a couple of things I’ve found out already, because they’re the kind of things that could blow our cover. Have you seen the shozei himself? Recently?”

Illana cocks her head, playing with the grapes she’s procured for herself. Keris isn’t sure how. This isn’t grape growing territory, and while she’d probably just get them from the Swamp if she wanted them, Lunars probably don’t have a way to grow reddish-purple grapes inside their soul. Unless they do.

“I keep track of him, yes,” she says, with a measured shrug. “What of it?”

“You know that jade eyepiece he has?” Keris asks. “The one that lets him see the essence-nature of things he looks at? How well-equipped are you to hide from it?”

“It’s potent, yes. But he doesn’t focus it on animals or people in crowds,” Illana says. She pales fractionally. “Did you get caught and come running here?” she demands.

“I’m not an idiot,” Keris says with a contemptuous eyeroll. “Hiding is one of the first things I was made for, else I’d only be useful as a wrecking ball. But if he’d been closer, he might have seen through me, and there’s no guarantee they haven’t dug up more wildcards like that in Eshtock. They had two sorcerers guarding the treasure-trove up there when I looked.”

“Anyway,” she adds, “I’d be more worried about the Lookshyian plant in the marketplace than anyone following me. How long has he been there?”

“Who do you believe to be a Lookshyian plant? I checked all of them, and there are currently no merchants from there here.”

Keris smirks. “No obvious ones, maybe, but the salt importer’s accent slips sometimes if you listen close enough. He passes well as Tairan, but there’s a Lookshyian twang under it that he works to hide.”

“Hmm.” Illana inspects her nails. “Do you want first shot at him? It’s only polite, as you found him. You can keep him if you want.”

Keris shrugs. “You can have him. I’m going to take another run up to Eshtock - because here’s the issue. Whatever way they’ve got to crack the mists; it’s contained. A parcel system. A _noisy_ parcel system - the whole interior rings like a giant gong whenever one of their groups punches through the wards. The only way to get in without alerting literally everything in the city is to force your way through the mists the hard way; directly against the current. I managed it on my first try, but only just - and I’m pretty sure I was lucky. I’m not sure I could repeat it reliably.”

“You got in?” Illana demands. Her usual neutral, almost blazé attitude is gone. “How?”

“I ran,” Keris says simply. For a moment, the light hits her face in a way that makes it easy to believe she’s something other than human; something alien and dangerous and strange. “You think some old mists called up by the Dragon’s get are the worst I’ve fought my way through? I’ve run through far, _far_ worse than that. The mists blind you, deafen you, numb you and try to make you lose your way, but they can’t _kill_. And I’m good at finding a way in. I scoped out the city, grabbed a few trinkets that wouldn’t be missed and took a stroll through their camp. There are four Dragonblooded up there at the moment, fifty-odd men and women, and the shift change will come soon.”

“Hmm. I’m a sorceress,” Illana says. “If their sorcerers are how they get in and out, I could counter that spell. If you’re proposing what I think you are, at least, which is to trap the shozei in there so there’s no way for him to run and no way for him to get help.”

“Exactly,” Keris confirms. “But to do that, _we_ need to get in ourselves. The quiet way. Preferably ahead of him. That’s going to be trickier.” She pauses for a moment. “Oh, and there are a few tower blocks full of what I’m fairly sure are plague-dead yidak from the Contagion. Say... thousands of them? Maybe tens of thousands; I didn’t exactly take a headcount. They’re penned into the towers by running water, but letting just a few hundred out would be enough of a distraction to keep the Lookshyians very, very busy.”

“No.” Illana’s voice is resolute. “No letting out hordes of eight hundred year old hungry ghosts.”

Keris rolls her eyes. “It’s not like I couldn’t kill them all afterwards. But fine, if it offends your sensibilities so much.” She eyes Illana. “I can’t promise none of them aren’t free-roaming, though. There are at least a few Dead loose in the city. The Lookshyian camp has more water, salt and oil in it than a city’s worth of kitchens.”

“That’s bad.” She sits back. “A scholar-ally of mine told me that it’s the fog bank and what that’s doing to the local climate which makes this place a sodden swamp and all the surrounding valleys so dry. The working that sustains the spell up there is sucking up all the moisture from these mountains. I had hoped that I could get rid of it, which would restore the imbalance. And of course, offer the chance for a lot of profit by being first on the scene.”

((Cog+Occult roll. 3+5+2 stunt=10. Haha, 8 sux.))

Keris shrugs, half-dismissing the vain hope.

Then her mind snags on a detail. Workings need to be anchored in something. Something powerful, like a manse or a cult... or an artifact.

“... well,” she says slowly, mentally knocking the value of that jade dragon up by another few pegs, “I wasn’t kidding when I said that I could kill them all afterwards. With the Dead all cooped up in tower blocks, unable to get out... and I couldn’t make out any potent yidak among them; they were all weak...”

She tilts her head. “I’m here to kill the shozei. But it wouldn’t be the first shadowland I’ve cleared, if I decided to... do some work on the side. The last one was on orders, but that was full of horrible necro-engineered Dead war machines - this wouldn’t be hard by comparison, since I could just retreat back over the water whenever I got tired. And just think - if I cleared out all the restless hungry dead, you could examine the working at your leisure and work out how to break it.”

Leaning forward, Keris offers Illana a friendly smile. “What would that be worth to you?”

((Using PoEU.))   
((Resources 5 valuation))

Keris can see it in her eyes, and hear it in her words - despite her pretended neutrality, getting a solution to the mists here would be worth an emperor’s ransom to her. A slow grin spreads across Keris’s face. “Well then. Let’s say that I take a larger share of the profits we find - and in return, I clear the Dead from the shadowland. I’ll be leaving the area once I’m done here, so you’ll be free to swoop in and make yourself rich. And, of course, you’ll know that if you ever come across a ‘problem’ like this again... you’ll have a nice, friendly ally to call on who hasn’t any interests of her own in the region. Which gives me some assurance that you won’t rat me out once I’m gone.”

“I don’t think you can seriously fight - what did you say, tens of thousands of ancient hungry ghosts,” Illana fires back. “Not to mention that I’m not foolish enough to assume that you won’t just take what you can grab - or, indeed, unleash the hordes of Hell to pillage the city.”

“Then what’s there to worry about?” Keris says innocently. “My first task here is to kill the shozei and frame Thorns. You can agree with pointing those two frothing beasts at each other, even with our differences - neither of us has any love for Lookshy or the Dead. And unleashing demons all over the city won’t help with that - even if I _could_ summon a horde of demons, which I can’t.”

She wrinkles her nose, getting briefly sidetracked. “Pity, really. That would’ve been really useful up in the Northeast. Anyway, I’ll do that, and _then_ try my hand at killing the yidaks. If I manage it; you’re set up to be a merchant-empress. If I fail and die, you’re rid of a scary hellish akuma. The way I see it; you win either way. Though yes, I will definitely be taking whatever I can grab - as will you, I’m sure.”

“Hmm.” Illana furrows her brow. “Well, did you at least map out a more up to date version of the city? I don’t want to have to work off eight hundred year old city plans.”

“Yeah yeah, I took some sketches. Hang on...” Cocking her head, Keris rummages around in her cloak to cover her hand pulling her sketchbook out of thin air. “Here we go.” She flips past a smattering of Hellish landscapes, one or two character studies of Kuha and her familiars, a... yikes, rather steamy one of Sasi bathing; she’s not showing Illana _that_... ah.

“Eshtock,” she announces, letting it fall open on the first of the relevant pages. “A few drawings from a distance - there are some of interesting bits of the city further on... and here’s the most complete street map. The skull icons are the towers with Dead penned up in them.”

((Rolling to analyse - 5 net successes))

“Hmm. That is a lot of skull-marked towers,” Illana says eventually, after nearly quarter of an hour greedily pouring over the pictures. “It looks to me from your notes and the damage that the fae attacked up the valley, probably destroying totally the smaller town that left the occasional bits of white stone we see around here. They held there, but then the defences collapsed when the fae flanked them up the slopes and charged down to surround them.”

Her fingers drum on the paper. “Even despite the damage, you can see how it was once a beautiful city. Eshtock was famous, you know, and very wealthy - it was a city of artisans and gemcutters. They made lens for the armies of the Shogunate. That’s probably where the Lookshyian found that eyepiece.” She shakes her head. “From what you say, they’ve fortified a location, but it sounds much less resilient than the external one. That one is warded even against scrying and many wild animals refuse to approach it. They know how to build their bases, but that forwards camp in the ruins sounds much more vulnerable.”

“I got in without much trouble,” Keris agrees. “The one down here would be harder.”

“Certainly,” she adds, “it sounds maybe safer to do it there than my previous plan if I found I had to do it, because the shozei sometimes goes out on patrol with his armed guard, and the idea was to target him out in the mire.”

Keris purses her lips - she, certainly, would be at an advantage in the marsh...

... but no. Best when he’s trapped and everything is contained by the mists. And she has the option of opening up one of the towers to fall back on, though she’s not going to tell Illana that she considers that an option that remains open. “Eshtock would be best, yes,” she agrees. “You know they’ll send investigators from Lookshy to confirm that it was Thorns, by the way? If you hang around, you’ll want to sell the story to deflect their attention that way.”

She strokes the faintly-suggested farmhouses at the edge of the sketched-out valley. “You’re right about the fae, too,” she says softly. “There are legions of them up there, you know. The slopes of the valley aren’t real stone, at the surface. They’re metres deep in petrified fae; all fleeing the centre. _Thousands_ of them. Those poor farmers never stood a chance.”

“They were fleeing?” Illana’s words are sharp.

“Yes. The working, I think. Or maybe whatever the First Scarlet did to end the Crusade. The way they’re all pointed; it’s like they knew something was coming and were trying to get away from whatever petrified them. Every last one in an instant.”

Keris’s face hardens from its soft reflection. “Serves them fucking right,” she adds in harsher tones.

Illana rises, face taut. “I know people I need to talk to. From what I heard, the mist was just a defensive weapon. To kill so many fae like that - there must have been another weapon there. One that wasn’t on the records I saw. And that means there could be other things, that the Lookshyians already have their hands on. That they could use against us - or accidentally turn on.” She nods. “I’ll see you in a few days,” she says. “For your part, you might do well to somehow ensure that the shozei goes into the mist. Because any plan we have is useless if he doesn’t go there.”

Keris scowls. “Wonderful. I’ll work on that. See you soon.” She slips out of the caravan, donning a new face in the cover of an alleyway. She has a few leads she can follow, she thinks. Maybe the Lookshyian spy in the marketplace could be used for some kind of lead or to help set up the evidence for what she wants them to suspect. Then again, if the Lookshyian leader is still out, maybe she can get into their base now. Or she could go for the naib, if the Lookshyians talk with him frequently. Maybe there’s another thing she could do instead.

Keris is only slightly ashamed to admit that most of those ideas were Dulmea prompting her.

The fort, she decides. With the shozei out, it’s down at least one Dragonblooded - and she wants a look at the other three that Kuha saw. Maybe she’ll have better luck at assessing it now that she’s rested.

“I think you should be all scary and dead-y when you decide what your costume is going to be for being a dead princess and make sure the spy-man sees you,” Zanara’s boyish voice pipes in. “But not yet. We have to design your costume!”

“Just what I was thinking, sweetheart,” Keris agrees. “I am going to swing past that salt-seller with a Thornsian face and accent, later. But he’s there all the time, and the shozei doesn’t spend much time out of the fort - so we need to hit it while we can.”

“I wish you could turn into a bird like she probably can,” Calesco observes. “Then you could just fly there.”

Alas, Keris cannot fly, but on foot she can sprint down the backstreets - which also takes the weight off her spine. Gods, when the damn babies are out, she’ll appreciate things like ‘being able to go prone’ even more, she promises herself.

It’s easy enough to sprint up the wall of one of the ruined buildings in the quarter, though she notices that the Lookshyians have built the walls taller than any of the ruins they left standing. Sneaky gits. It means she can’t see what’s within that area beyond the central citadel, although from the size of the compound she suspects that there’s probably a training square and likely low-rise buildings.

Melting into the stone and the dirt of the street, Keris creeps closer by inches until she’s flat against the fortress wall. This close, with her ear pressed against the sorcerously-raised stone, she can hear what’s behind it. Perhaps not with the better-than-eyesight precision that she can hear the street around her, but at least enough to make out the hum of conversation, the sound of armoured footsteps - and the shape of the spaces beyond the wall.

From the echoes and the noises of the voices within, Keris guesses that her initial estimate is about right. There only sounds like there are twenty or so men inside there, and five of them are on the walls, obviously putting up a show of force while their best fighters are away. She can hear the sound of flints and burning tobacco - men smoking - and there are several people down in the depths, along with the unmistakable clanking of pots and the sound of fire as they prepare food.

The first time she cased the fort; Keris had done so with the eye of an attacker - the mindset of the pirate queen instinctively coming to the fore when faced with Exalted opposition. This time, she falls back on more fundamental skills, and looks with the eye of a thief. She’s not planning to attack the fort - just slip inside unseen and leave the same way after a look around.

Now this, Keris notes, might be very well designed against a military attack, but it’s not built to withstand a single thief - especially not one like Keris. The guards aren’t really looking at the recesses of the star-shaped wall, and the entire structure is built as a military thing. Even when she was mortal, she could probably have gotten over the first wall at night with a rope and a hook.

As it stands, she can get in over the walls. They’ll probably have Bag-house-like alarm magics on the interior structures of value, but the bunkhouses and the kitchens? Not likely. People’ll be coming and going too often. But she’ll need to be very careful with the citadel, and she knows they have sorcerers. She’ll need to keep her eyes and ears open for spirits. Licking her lips, she takes a deep breath and braces herself, running through her plan in her head before committing. A quick dart over the wall will be safe enough. Then she can do as Dulmea taught her and disguise herself as a servant - a kitchen-worker or something. They can’t be nothing but soldiers; the fort would fall apart without servant-staff. And servants are invisible.

Of course, Agenete has taught her not to assume. She’ll blend into the background before disguising herself. Check for any invisible spirits. Watch a few servants to make sure they aren’t sporting little badges or papers or... or special necklaces like Kasseni’s estate back in Nexus had. Then move around as cleaning staff for no more time than it takes to locate the Dragonblooded she’s looking for, and leave.

She nods to herself. Good plan. Right then. Time to put it into practice.

It’s a slow crawl on all fours through the open field of view up to the fortress, a hidden predator working its way there silently - and then a mad dash up the wall, over it, and then a leap onto a blocky military bunkhouse and a slither down the far side.

She’s in. And she can get out just as easily.

The two storey bunkhouses are clustered around the open parade ground. There’s ten of them. Keris estimates that between them, they could probably house a thousand men between them. Given from what Illana said and they only have about four hundred, they’re either thinking ahead or they’re rigidly building this facility to a standardised design. There’s stables, a forge, a big water storage thing and several warehouses. This could easily be the centre of a new town or hold off attackers for months.

Keris sucks in a breath, faintly impressed. They got this entire place set up in a few months - certainly less than a year. She could do with a trained Dragonblooded engineers in the Hui Cha, if that’s what they can do this quickly.

And of course, there’s the five storey high central citadel, a blocky and solid-looking design that fills up the centre of the redoubt. It’s solid stone, but the three lower levels look grown while the upper two look built. Perhaps the magic they used to pull up stone from the earth can’t make it go that high. It’s basically a second layer of fortification, with full view over the entire location.

There’s only a few men in there. Most of them are in one of the nearby bunkhouses, where the noise of the cooking is coming from. Two women sit on the porch there in light uniforms without their armour on, smoking.

Sat still and seamlessly blended into the wall, Keris takes her time looking around for the servants and assessing the entrances to the citadel, as well as scoping out the general thread of the conversations she can hear. She’s not willing to rush - but at the same time, she’s aware of the mental countdown before the shozei finishes whatever business he has with the naib.

There don’t seem to be servants here. There’s just lower ranking soldiers, with less fancy symbols on the arms of their uniforms. Everyone Keris sees here seems to be part of the Lookshyian army, whether it’s the two men who drag out a bale of hay to feed the mules in the stables, or the sweating woman who comes out to get a breath of fresh hair, muttering about how hot it is down in the kitchens.

The citadel itself has one main entrance, and a smaller entrance on the second floor only approached by a narrow staircase. The windows low down are thin slits, clearly meant for shooting arrows out of rather than letting light in, but the higher up floors have larger windows which look firmly shuttered.

Well... well drat. Posing as a soldier is a lot more dangerous. With a garrison this small, there’s a decent chance that everyone knows everyone else’s faces - which means that disguising herself will be a much riskier proposition as far as being recognised goes.

And that’s discounting the risk of magic on the citadel. Keris sighs inside. This is definitely going to give her a headache later, but...

Screwing her eyes shut, she opens the locks on her hearing and pushes it to a level beyond even its usual sensitivity, until the swoosh of essence through the dragon lines and the whispering of the least gods in every stone is audible.

... yup, yeah, yes, that’s painfully loud. Ow ow ow ow ow.

Keris can hear the chiming of the keep. The entire thing seems to be wrapped in multiple layers of enchantment. There are alarm spells at the windows, probably akin to the Baghouse ones Keris knows from Nexus. There’s something fortifying the soft stone until it’s metal-hard, and there’s another one which Keris recognises from Sasi showing it to her, which prevents any kind of scrying from looking into it. That also includes stopping things like Infallible Messenger, she recalls.

“It’d also stop me getting into their dreams,” Calesco observes.

There also seems to be something coming from the well, something which makes sure there’s a fresh spring here.

... well. That’s definitely... impressive. Keris decides to leave that for the moment, since it looks like her only ways in will be disabling an alarm spell on a window or sneaking in through the main entrance under heavy stealth. And before she tries either of those, she might as well first check that there aren’t any Dragonblooded in the bunkhouses or the rest of the outer ring.

((Reaction + Investigation, Diff 1))   
((5+1+2 Coadj+2 stunt=10.   
... 10 successes? Really? On _this_ roll? _REALLY?_ ))

Keris swiftly finds that no, there is not.

((I HATE YOU, DICE FAIRIES))

For a moment, she’s seriously tempted to just give up and retreat. The fortress is... well, a fortress, and the last time Keris found herself alone in a Dragonblooded redoubt... well, it didn’t end well for her.

She purses stone-grey lips assessingly.

“Dulmea?” she asks. “What’s your take? Worth pushing in to read the other three and see what they’ve got stockpiled in here?”

Dulmea hums thoughtfully. “At the very least, I would suggest scaling the citadel to inspect the nature of the alarm spells, child,” she says professionally. “They may be simple enough that you can negate them through thaumaturgical rites, as I know you can do. This structure is clearly built to repel foes seeking to attack it conventionally, and so it may well be weaker from the top.”

Keris hums thoughtfully. “Not here,” she decides. “Too many lines of sight from the parade grounds. Lemme move around the back; it should be safer there. The guards on the wall are looking out.”

Keris is a ghost. Actually, she’s rather more sneaky than a ghost, because a ghost would have been seen by the watchful demons who squat like gargoyles on the citadel’s walls, watching the skies. Keris slips past them, and gets up onto the roof, where there are covered ballistae waiting to be manned if this place is attacked. From here she can either scale back down the walls to try to get into one of the fifth floor windows, or just try the door up here.

((Can she hear any spells on the door?))   
((Yes, it has an alarm spell woven into it - a thaumaturgical one.))   
((Same as the windows, presumably.))

Humming to herself, Keris edges up to the door and inspects it carefully. Thaumaturgy, her ears tell her, not a spell. A hair tendril weaves itself into a knotted cord as she runs through the layers of the ward with the patient, predatory intent that she learned as a cat burglar in Nexus.

Of course, setting off _this_ alarm if she gets it wrong will be rather more dangerous than it would have been in Nexus. It’ll certainly be a lot harder to run away.

((This is a 15 minute Cog + Occult dramatic roll to work out what she needs, probably pulling the required tools from her Domain and try to get in. Diff 3 to break the spell, Diff 4 to just unlock it))

She doesn’t know when the shozei is due back. Nevertheless, Keris takes her time. She could just break the spell, and that might even help her cover if she leaves a Thornsian trinket around or something... but she doesn’t want to put the Lookshyians on guard. Against a war veteran like her target, getting the first strike in may well be the difference between a challenging but quick murder and a drawn-out four-on-one deathmatch.

So she’s slow. She’s methodical. She works as carefully as she needs to in order to find the way to make the alarm spell open, instead of just unravelling it. And she keeps a couple of hair-tendrils crossed that the shozei will take his time returning.

Keris remembers the old days, her time in Nexus, the way she’d traded away good amounts of her loot for black-market recipes for the kinds of little spells that rich men used to call vengeance on those who stole their treasures and alert them to people who broke in through windows.

Now, of course, she can hear the magic and it changes the whole tenor. It’s now more like picking a lock than desperately hoping that her spells will work. This time she can take it slowly, and work out what makes this spell tick.

Keris sits back on her haunches. “Rust, salt and silver,” she says. “Dulmea, pass me my kit.” She takes that little box she keeps packed away, and takes out a silver coin, sprinkling some rust onto it and a pinch of salt. She slides the coin under the door, and she can hear the spell twist and unlock as the offering confuses it. Now all she has to do is to pick the lock, and it’s a cheap, simple lock that her hair can easily do.

She’s in.

The stone on the inside is white-washed, and stark in its simplicity. The corridors are narrow and the walls are reinforced. There’s little light up here, because almost no one is around. That’s just as well. There’s one person, working up here - their pen scratching away. Keris can hear the hue of their soul, and they’re a weak ocean current.

((Water Aspect, E4))

There’s the water that wasn’t up in the valley, she thinks. Two more to go, then. She edges cautiously along the corridor in quick bursts of total silence, working her way down. Her spine prickles. Her fingers itch. She’s even more on edge here than in the Lookshyian camp up in Eshtock, and the route back to the door stands out in her mind with every turn; a glowing line writ in blazing colour.

If she still had to breathe, she’d probably be finding it hard to. That, or it would be coming quick and shallow.

‘C’mon, c’mon,’ she mutters - inwardly, because she’s not fool enough to make a sound in this place. ‘Where are the other two, where are they? Wait, shit. Sorcerers. There were two up in the valley looking through the loot. Maybe they have the same setup down here.’

((Physique + Subterfuge))   
((Do I know the Diff, or is it a mystery box?))   
((It’s just setting up a baseline for contested rolls.))   
((... yeah, this is probably the riskiest part, and why I’ve been saving motes.   
5+5+2 stunt+3 Silver Willow+2 Amulet+5 Adorjani ExSux=17. 7+5=12 sux, x2 when she’s still.))

Delicately, gently, Keris eases open the door which the watery Dragonblood is in, and peeks through. As it happens, they’re a woman, with short black hair, large spectacles, and a slightly wet air. This is probably not an elemental feature, but just looking at her Keris decides this is the kind of woman who was never born to be a leader and much prefers sitting back here at base doing paperwork than going up into mist-choked valleys or consulting with naibs.

And there’s certainly paperwork here, and a large sculpted map of the area, and all kinds of records and staffing memos and pay slips - and a little tea kettle set up on a tiny fire, which is just boiling now.

The Lookshyian is distracted by her kettle now. She looks like she feels she’s in dire need of more tea. A non-combatant, Keris thinks. That’s reassuring, and means there might be fewer Dragonblooded up in the valley on the next shift. But while Keris wouldn’t mind a look through that paperwork, doing it right under the woman’s nose would be risky - and wouldn’t tell her how strong her opposition is. She needs to go looking for the others.

Then again... maybe she can find them right here. Eyeing the woman’s progress on the tea, Keris eases the door open a little further and scuttles inside. She has maybe a minute or so to get everything she needs and be gone, and sets a mental sand-clock going as soon as she’s inside.

Her first look is at the map; rapidly scanning it for anything she doesn’t already know about. Then the papers on the desk. She dares not sift through them all for what’s useful, but she can skim what’s on top - and slip any partly-covered ones out for a quick perusal before replacing them.

Oh, that’s interesting, Keris thinks as her finely honed instincts go immediately for what’s most profitable. And this kind of classified military deployment information is valuable.

Shozei Amiliar Mena is the major in charge of the talon of 600-odd men and women, with a supporting scale of 25 from the sorcerer-engineering corps. They’re from the Fourth Field Corps - the Lookshyian specialists at, among other things, “acquiring” resources. Karal Fara is the sorcerer-engineer in charge of the investigation of Eshtock, and she’s recorded as being Air-Aspected - Keris thinks she was the one up in Eshtock. She seems awfully young for that position. Maybe family connections or maybe she’s a prodigy.

The reason, Keris discovers, that there are “missing” troops is that the Lookshyians both are escorting regular caravans of plunder from Eshtock back to the Grey River, disguised as grain shipments, but they’re also searching the surrounding areas. Multiple detachments of specialists led by veterans - many Dragonblooded among them - are essentially plundering Taira quietly. They’re travelling in disguise as small mercenary bands, their armour hidden in their carts, and then they’re attacking places they find have salvageable Shogunate and First Age resources. They apparently have magical stealth armour, that can do similar things to what Keris can do with regards to blending into the background.

This? This is red-hot. No wonder it’s valuable information - in these notes are full deployment information on what this Lookshyian field force is doing, and how it’s spread all over Taira.

There’s another thing that catches Keris’ attention, too. It’s a blue jade machine that rather resembles her cherub shrine, except... not quite. It’s got a strange contraption attached to the front of it, that looks like a bunch of blocks with letters on it, and it has a scroll leading out from it. It’s certainly an artefact, though. Keris focuses in on it, fascinated by the little thing. She cocks an ear to its least god, keeping a wary eye on the tea-progress of the Dragonblood across the room.

Yes, it certainly is a cousin to her cherub shrine, Keris decides. But only a cousin. Rather than send one message at a time to anywhere in Creation, it is instead twinned with another similar message-machine. If someone presses one of the symbol-keys on the front, the twinned machine prints off the same symbol onto the paper. It also has a very limited amount of power, however - they’ll be limited in how long the things they can send are. However, the very interesting thing is how it seems to be tied into the warding spell around this place. It’s like the spell was built to have a loophole in it, to let this machine talk through it.

Fascinating, she decides. And useful... but too risky to take. She’s willing to bet that this one is twinned either with one in Eshtock, or one back in Lookshy. In the former case, she can take that one when she’s up there next - in the latter, there’s no point in stealing it.

The notes on the Lookshyian deployments, though... oh, those are valuable. Those are _very_ valuable. Keris hesitates only for a moment before making a decision.

She’s taking these.

But if she can make it look like they were just lost; all the better. A set of misplaced papers might attract attention, if they’re super-valuable... but there’s a chance her ruse will hold. And even if someone works out they were taken - that still fits with an Abyssal being in the area without incriminating her Yozi origins.

((Activating Passing Off Blame _and_ Theft As Release for 9m, 2wp. This makes it look like it was misplaced somewhere and lost, gives a +4 external penalty to actions opposing the theft, disguises the notes’ absence for the rest of the scene and makes the little wet moe-DB forget she had it - I’m assuming that she counts as the “owner”.   
... and then Keris is GTFOing back through the door and out of the fort, because this is red hot information and a lot more important than IEIing the other two DBs that are probably here somewhere.))   
((How is she tampering with the scene and what is she blaming, if anything? A tea accident, an unfortunate breeze, or just things going missing?))   
((Hmm. Tea accident is probably best - if it ruins several papers, they’ll assume it’s destroyed rather than missing and not panic about someone finding it.   
Sorry, moe-DB. You’re probably going to get blamed for this.))

There’s one thing that Keris can’t help but feeling, as she carefully filches the interesting documents from the files, and then pads them out with other bits of paper. Sasi is going to be so, so proud of her when she tells her about this.

Then it’s just a matter of easing things so they’re next to the tea kettle, and oh, a little yank with a hair tendril. A crash, a splash, and the Dragonblooded woman wails in anguish.

“Not again!”

But Keris is creeping out, easing her way out, and then she’s recovering her coin from the door and she’s off and out of here, down the citadel and up and out over the wall.

“Very well done, child,” Dulmea says. She sounds genuinely proud of Keris here. “That was far better done and far less sloppy than other things you’ve done, and that information seems most valuable. Keep a close hold of it - and perhaps don’t tell that moon-witch about the things the Lookshyians are getting up to. This is _your_ blackmail material, not hers.”

“I know,” thinks Keris. “But... urgh.”

She hops up onto a rooftop to think. “Okay. On the one hand, it’s mine, I stole it, I went to great _risks_ to steal it, and it’s red hot.”

She pouts, lifting a hair tendril and starting to easing the knots out of it. “On the other hand... it’s not gonna be red hot forever. It’s time-based, and I’m not based in Taira, and it’s the sort of thing that... honestly, the Reclamation probably needs to know.”

Another hand goes up. “That said, Orange Blossom is a blackmailing hold-out bitch and I hate her.”

One final hair-tendril. “ _But_... if I give her this, she might be more open to giving me Baisha. And... it’d help the Reclamation. A lot.”

Rathan hums happily. “Oh, mama,” he suggests, “given you got that with my help to blame that silly woman for it, may I suggest something?” He doesn’t pause before adding, “This may be valuable enough that you can re-negotiate the terms of the agreement with Orange Blossom. Why bother to kill a Dragonblooded in a complicated and dangerous way, if you can poison Lookshy’s reputation in the Scavenger Lands? This information might be more than worth it to her - and she knows you can pass the same information to Sasi instead of her.”

Calesco harrumphs. “I’d rather see Thorns suffer than Lookshy,” she grumbles.

“There’s no reason we can’t go ahead and do both,” Keris remarks to Calesco. “I’m still in a good position to kill him, if it comes to it - and that’ll wreck Lookshy’s reputation _and_ get them pointed at Thorns.”

She hums to herself, thinking it over. “Okay. Okay, I can’t be sure that Orange Blossom isn’t busy with something delicate, so an Infallible Messenger’s out. Calesco, I need you to- no, wait. I’m not letting her know you exist.”

Dropping into meditation, she emerges in Dulmea’s dome, where Calesco is practicing tea-preparation under the watchful eye of a Chord and Rathan is brushing his long, gorgeous hair. Keris can hear him keeping count of the number of strokes on each side; currently somewhere in the three hundreds.

“Rathan’s right,” she says. “It’s time to renegotiate. Calesco, can you send an arrow-dream of me saying something to Orange Blossom, wherever she is?”

Calesco sniffs. “As long as she’s not hiding in a place like that citadel,” she says. “Or Illana’s cart.”

Keris smirks. “Okay, have my image tell her that... hmm... I’ve come across valuable, time-critical information about a major operation that Lookshyian forces are carrying out all across Taira, which could poison their reputation all through the Hundred Kingdoms. Tell her that I’m willing to give her this information in full - including equipment, methods and locations - if she’s willing to take it as payment for Baisha - and that if she wants what I know _and_ the shozei dead, she’s going to owe me one. And tell her that she can reply by Infallible Messenger if she sends it to the demon Rounen in my service, and that I’m telling her this way so as not to interrupt her if she’s around mortals or undercover.”

Calesco smiles, flashing jade teeth. “Oh, I can’t wait to see how you muck this one up,” she observes, unslinging her bow from her back and plucking a long quill from under her veils.

“Why do you have to be like that?” Rathan demands.

“Experience,” Calesco retorts. “Now shut up. You know nothing about inter-soul archery, but trust me, it’s not as easy as I make it look.”


	6. Chapter 6

Calesco looses her arrow. Now comes the waiting. At the very earliest, Keris probably won’t get the message until tomorrow morning. Urgh. That’s the cost of Calesco being so sneaky - it’s slower than an Infallible Messenger by a loooooooong way. She breathes out - a slow, deliberate breath - and nods. “Okay. Thank you, Calesco. Right, so until Orange Blossom responds, we assume that the mission is still on. That means we need to make sure the shozei heads up to Eshtock with the next shift, if he isn’t already planning on it.”

She considers this. “Fine, _first_ of all we figure out if he’s planning on going up anyway. Damn, should’ve looked through those documents for the next shift-roster. I bet they plan that sort of thing. Though there might be one up in the Eshtock camp too...”

Calesco sighs wearily. “Mama, are you just Eko-ing and forgetting things for no good reason at all? You took the deployment information, didn’t you? Wouldn’t that have information on where they deploy people to?”

“Don’t be mean to her,” Rathan snaps.

“Eko is my big sister and I am entirely used to her forgetting everything when it suits her. If I can stop Mama doing that too, everything will be better,” Calesco says wearily.

“The bits I flipped through were more places and targets than exact schedules,” Keris defends. “Though it’s all in this stupid Lookshyian army gibberish with weird terms... hang on.” She snatches the papers from the Chord sorting through them and goes over them in more detail; no longer pressed for time or forced to skim-read in parallel with a dozen other documents.

On a more careful scan through, Keris notices that while there aren’t formal schedules in the documents she found, they do specify that the commanding officer should personally inspect all significant finds or major newly discovered caches once they have been deemed safe. The standing orders _do_ , however, state that the commanding officer must remain in contact with field forces when possible.

“Which,” Calesco says smugly, “means he won’t be going into the fog for extended periods. He’ll go in to inspect the new discoveries, but he won’t be stationed there -he has to be able to talk to the ground forces in the rest of Taira, yes?”

Keris’s mouth twists. “I can see where this is heading, and _absolutely not, no way, not under any circumstances_ am I using the dragon statue to lure him in.”

She purses her lips. “But if I go back up and find something _else_ for them to stumble over - something ‘major’ or ‘significant’ - that gives us a window. We don’t need him to spend a lot of time there, just visit once.”

“Oh, they’ll obviously know about the dragon statue anyway,” Calesco says.

“What?” Rathan says, blinking.

Calesco sneers at him, little bow-shaped lips pursing behind her veils. “Oh, sorry, I forgot you’re stupid. It was an art gallery. A big famous place. And the dragon statue was on major display. They probably told everyone that the museum had that before the city was destroyed. Of course the Lookshyians know the statue is there.”

“Sure,” Keris says. “But it was still there; they hadn’t moved it. There was no sign of them in the art gallery, no thaumaturgic wards, no guards, no protections against the Dead like the camp had. Yeah, they probably knew it was somewhere in the city - but with as far out from their camp as the gallery was; in an area they hadn’t explored yet - hells, Calesco, the bodies at the front still had _armour_ on. They’d have looted that for sure. They knew it was somewhere in the city, but not _where_ \- any maps would have been hard-pressed to last almost eight hundred years.”

She nods assertively. “So, they hadn’t found it yet. Probably searching with a boring predictable grid pattern, block by block, all methodical and slow so as to get everything and not walk into any traps. Instead of just going out and combing the city at speed until they found the place.”

“Or,” Calesco suggests, “they scouted out the city, confirmed it was present, noted its location, and then left it there because it was massive, heavy, and a piece of art rather than something which made things explode.”

“Without a guard?” Keris says scornfully. “Without even _wards against the Dead_ \- lines of salt or something? Anyway, regardless, we’re not using it as bait so the point’s moot. Going up and finding something else to drop into their laps will work to draw him out. But I don’t want to take a run at that fog until I know if there’s any point in setting up the assassination, and I especially don’t want to take any more runs through it than are absolutely necessary. Which at the moment is one; to get the dragon and probably tear the mists down.”

Calesco mutters “What are the hungry ghosts going to do, eat the jade?” but then she yelps and her hair darts out to grab Rathan’s hair. “Oh, just because I’m helping and-”

“Cally, shut up. You’re boring us,” Rathan says with an overt yawn. “So, Mama, when are you going to set up that there’s a deathknight in the area? Maybe that might help you trick him in. Or you could be all fake deathknighty and kill some Lookshyians - making sure to leave witnesses - ‘cause they’ve hardly got any people, so if you start killing them, they’re going to have to start choosing whether to send less people into the fog place or leave less guards on their base place. And if they don’t leave people on the base, you can probably kill him in there. Or something.”

“Great plan, idiot,” Calesco retorts. “Why not just put everyone on alert looking for a deathknight?”

“Isn’t that the point?” Rathan says, leaning back with false boredom.

“Alright, you two, enough!” Keris snaps. “The enemy here is Lookshy, not each other!” She purses her lips. “Both of you are right. I don’t want them on alert before I make my strike on the shozei, because my first shot at him is going to be crucial, and if I can take him by surprise or distract him enough to land a solid blow then I’ve won half the fight right there. But I _do_ need to start setting up fingers to point at Thorns. Which I can start doing by setting up a trail of someone with the right look and accent passing through the city - make sure the guards note me down, talk to the salt merchant; that sort of thing.”

“Wearing a skull mask and black robes and talking like your voice is all croaky,” Rathan says, nodding.

“Why are you so stupid?” Calesco whines. “If only Hanny was here. You literally know nothing about sneaking.”

“Calesco,” Keris warns. “No, just something subtle. Like how R- like a red scarf around my neck.”

Calesco springs to her feet. “I’m going to my cave!” she shouts, storming off. “Don’t follow me.”

“She’s so mean and nasty,” Rathan says, shaking his head after Calesco is gone. “Now, come on, mama. We’ll go find boy-Zanara and we can get you looking all proper deathknighty.”

Pinching the bridge of her nose, Keris groans. “Urgh. Yeah, okay, fine. I’ll go and talk to her once she’s calmed down a bit. For now; art.”

Zanara as it so happens already has a costume design for being a deathknight. In fact, he has several. There’s the one which is made entirely of flayed skin, there’s the one which is bone white with purple ribbons everywhere (“Eko helped with that one,” he says happily), there’s the one which looks like what the doctors would wear when there was plague in Nexus, and there’s the one which involves Keris dressing normally, but surgically modifying herself so she looks like a water-bloated corpse. Zanara says the last one would look gorgeous in bile green.

After Rathan’s nagging, Zanara also has a black robe with a skull mask and fingerbones taped to the hands.

“Of course,” he says, with a happy grin, “we can always make something even more fun! Like being a ghost! With that cool mask that Kerisa has!”

“...” says Keris eloquently. “Okay, I was thinking something a _little_ more subtle. We need two costumes - one full armour version, and one that can _pass for a normal person_. But has some subtle hints at it, like a red scarf for a slit throat, or... or mourning colours, or something.”

“Well, if you take off most of the ribbons that Eko stuck on, the white one is like the one the deathy priestess people who took bodies on the river from Nexus used to wear,” Zanara says, with an adorable little pout. His face is almost entirely human right now, even if his lower half is rather more slug-like. “She went over the top! I just wanted to put amethysts on!”

Keris considers it, mentally subtracting the ribbons. “True,” she agrees, kissing him on the forehead. “Rathan, what do you think?”

Rathan considers it. Tilts his head. Chews on a lock of hair. “Needs at least one skull,” he says. “Maybe a silver skull necklace. Or a pattern of little embroidered skulls around the hem.”

“What’s your thing about skulls?” Keris chuckles. “Are they that important? Though I guess I could make up a little ancestor-honouring amulet to wear that had a skull theme to it.”

Rathan gives Keris a slightly pitying look. “Because they’re deathknights, and skulls mean death.”

Zanara bites his lip. “Yes, that’s very astute, big bro,” he says, trying not to laugh.

Keris considers the outfit once more, and nods. “We’ll go with the whites, then,” she says. “And something like them but more civilian for the passing-as-mortal disguise. Same colour scheme and all. Could you make me up some suggestions for them while I go and tell Calesco off for getting angry and yelling?”

“Oh, that was the civilian idea,” Zanara says. “It’s a priestess! Priestesses are around and about, but the local people here won’t know them! But the Lookshyians have probably seen those deathy priestess people in the Scavenger Lands so they’ll recognise them!” He taps his nose. “That’s cunningness!”

“Yes, but I’d... hmm. I’d need an excuse for them not to be on guard - or my fake Thorns identity would need an excuse for being here so as not to set them on guard so that they can look back and realise she... so they can be on guard for how she was trying to get them off... guard...”

Keris stops and pinches the bridge of her nose again. Argh. It always gets confusing when her fake identities and covers start using fake identities and covers of their own. “I’ll see if I can come up with a good way to balance being noticeable _enough_ but not _too_ obvious,” she says. “And also if I can get Calesco to stop calling people stupid in family meetings. Thank you for helping, both of you.”

“Girl-me thinks that she’s trying to be Hanny ‘cause she’s not here,” Zanara contributes. “She’s not Hanny at all. Her court is way worse and her keruby are no way as good at feeding me things, even if they do have lots of sweets.”

“She’s probably missing her sister,” Keris sighs. “I know I am. Are you two? She’s been gone for what feels like ages, I know. And the Messengers from Sasi aren’t the same.”

“‘Course I’m not missing her,” Rathan says blithely. “It’s way quieter without her around and the Swamp hasn’t caught fire once and she isn’t having temper tantrums all the time. The only... the only problem is how Cally doesn’t have Hanny to keep her in check and now she’s being triple-mean and she has more time to pick on me.”

“Girl-me is missing her lots,” Zanara says, shoulders hunched. “It’s why we’re being I-me more. I-me doesn’t like her as much as she-me does.” He looks up at Keris, multi-coloured splotchy irises wobbling. “I-me doesn’t like thinking about that and how she-me thinks differently from I-me, but she-me finds it funny and wants to do this more.”

“Hey, shhhh,” whispers Keris, immediately moving forward to gather him into her arms - as best she can with him being slug-ish, anyway. “I’m sorry it’s making you feel bad,” she murmurs. “And Rathan, come here and let me hug you too. You deserve one for helping look after Zanara and for not yelling back at Calesco even if you’re not missing Haneyl. And if you are missing her a bit and don’t want to say, that’s fine too. Here.” With how she’s half-crouched to embrace Zanara, he has to bend down to hug her properly - urgh, why are all her children getting so _tall?_ \- but he’s still nice and calming and soothing to cuddle, and laps up the attention happily.

The family time soothes Keris, but it does remind her that the clock is ticking if she wants to get something done today while the people of the town are awake.

Deciding to leave Calesco for an hour or so more until she’s worked off the black mood and Keris has some actual actions against Thorns to under her belt, Keris surfaces from her meditation and heads out of town, thinking hard. She’s going to need a reason for a Sijanese priestess to be operating further out of her territory than is normal - but she can probably pass that off with a story about a special case who moved to Taira from further North, and still wants to be interred in the City of the Dead.

With that decided, she pulls her shadow over her and takes on a new appearance. Pale, with ash-blonde hair and the white robes of a death-priestess from the River of Tears. She’ll go through the gates and make sure the guard notice her, then give it a day before passing the salt merchant. And, hah! She can have it look like Thorns is trying to pin the blame on Sijan, but have her accent give her away!

The guards on the gate definitely notice her. It’s not often they see someone so unusually dressed - and her pallor sticks out like a sore thumb, here, as do the faded marks of consumption on her. She placates their questions with partial truths - that she is a priestess travelling to attend to a summons - and while her Sijanese accent is good, she lets a casual hint of Thornsian burr slip in on a few repeated syllables and one or two turns of phrase.

Rathan’s light veils her, drawing their attention and protecting her from suspicion - but that’s fine, she doesn’t need them to notice the Thorns in her voice. She just needs them to remember her coming through the gates, so that the Lookshyians will find the records later.

((LSD and ESM, obviously - the, sigh, fictional death of this fictional false identity is a death of consumption after apparent recovery. BOT to keep them from getting the bad kind of suspicious.   
3+5+2 stunt+4 Kimmy ExSux {undercurrents of distrust and dissent, elegant practicality}=10. 8+4=12 sux.))

Keris sees the Lookshyian in the watchtower peeking down at her. She hears the slight “hmm” of suspicion, of feeling that things don’t quite line up - but the idiots down in the gate might not be quite as stupid as she thought, because one of them clumsily bows to her and says his mama taught him to always be nice to priests from Sijan.

She bestows a special smile on him, and a minor blessing-gesture she vaguely recalls seeing a death-priest in Nexus use, years before. Then, without apparent hurry or any notice of the Lookshyian up in the tower, she moves on into the town.

There’s a small-but-present chance that they’ll want to track her down and see her in person when the news of this makes it back to the shozei. If he’s paranoid enough to use his eyepiece on random women in shops who look out of place from their hair, he’s probably paranoid enough to want a personal look at something as out-of-place as a Sijanese priestess thousands of miles from home.

Well, hah. Joke’s on them. They won’t find her, because she’ll be back at the room with Kuha, waiting for an answer from Orange Blossom. And if that makes them more suspicious, it only plays right into her hands.

People treat her differently. They avoid her in the street. Some people clench their hands to their chests on seeing her. No one dares jostle the pallid woman with the scars on her face, so she drifts through the town as if protected by an unseen wall that no one dares cross.

And oh yes, the Lookshyian merchant definitely sees her. He stares at her as she passes, and she makes sure to ask some questions in that Thorns-pretending-to-be-Sijanese accent she’s faking.

Who’d have thought that her time on the Nexan docks where plenty of sailors talked to her would have come in handy now?

Once she’s fairly sure he’s got what she needs, she moves off again, vaguely impressed at the way the crowds split in front of her. This is actually... it’s not at all subtle, and her skin prickles at how everyone stares, but somehow there’s a strange anonymity in how obvious she is. Nobody dares talk to her. Nobody exactly moves away from her in an obvious way, but the random motion of bodies just happens to leave her isolated. It’s like she’s alone in the middle of a crowded marketplace, because people aren’t brave enough to approach.

She might need to think about using this sort of cover again, in other places.

But she’s still glad to drop the disguise once she’s confident she’s truly alone, and return to the room with Kuha, Rounen and Kerisa. Being stared at is exhausting and uncomfortable - back home in Saata as Little River it’s different, but she definitely doesn’t like it when she’s not on her own territory. Operating in the shadows, Keris decides, is vastly preferable.

By now, the sun is setting. As it moves through the Season of Air, it’s getting colder and already night arrives with an unpleasant chill. When Keris looks up the mountainside, she can see the fog rolling down.

But of course, she needs to get Kuha fed - and Rounen too, because he’s getting grumpy about the rats here not being big enough - and as the sun sets Kerisa wakes up, rising from the ground and stretching like a little girl rather than an ancient ghost.

“That was so comfy,” she says, spinning in delight. “I should put my bones on cushions ages and ages ago. Did you find my parents?”

When everyone is fed and Rounen is telling Kerisa a story about how szelkeruby are super-annoying, Keris considers things. Should she get anything done tonight or should she just potter and wait for Orange Blossom’s reply? Maybe see if she can find a more comfortable place for them to stay, one with - Unspeakable Blue, too much to hope? - access to a bath.

Yes, she decides. Lodgings with a bath sound like an _excellent_ idea. And then she can spend a few hours _in_ the bath and sleep better and quicker! Of course, that’s dependent on there _being_ a decent place in this town, but all she really needs is somewhere large enough and private enough that she can set up and heat a bath of her own if they don’t have one. Even in her street rat days, she knew how a waterproof tarp hung right and a heavy rainfall could get you something you could get clean in - and a clean kid in nicer clothes was less likely to get a boot when loitering around the nicer places in Nexus district.

Keris gets lucky. And perhaps also might have a slightly happier Calesco because of it. This town isn’t large enough or prominent enough to have real hotels as Nexus has, but while she’s searching she hears a woman trying to soothe a coughing, hacking child, and a few white lies about being a travelling doctor is enough to let her treat the boy. The mother, Aihani, is very thankful for this and when they’re talking she’s shocked that Keris is staying in an awful place like that. She tells Keris, wagging her finger at her, that she shouldn’t fall for the tricks of the gate guards to funnel people to their awful relatives, and insists she comes home with her since she spare rooms which are usually used when her husband’s cousin comes in to sell things but he’s not here right now so they’re empty.

... and yes, perhaps Keris nudged her to make that offer, but honestly, as she settles into the small but warm whitewashed room, it was for a good cause. They don’t have a proper bath, but Aihani tells Keris about how there is a bathhouse in town, and in the meantime provides her with a large wooden bucket that’s at least enough to hold hot water and scrub herself and Kuha down. It’s enough for the moment - though Keris is definitely going to visit the bathhouse and just _soak_ for a few hours when she next gets the chance. And in the meantime she can relax here, in quality that’s better than the slumhouse if not as good as her Baisha...

... Makers, she misses the Baisha. Keris is really starting to regret not bringing it. Sure, it wouldn’t have been that useful in her mission... and would have stood out a bit and risked notice even if she’d kept it submerged in the Grey River the whole time... and been a right hassle to get upriver at all given the limited places it could enter Creation... but gods and hells, even retrofitted for battle her warship is the lap of luxury compared to anything built by mortal hands.

“See,” Calesco contributes spitefully in her head, “being nice _does_ help.”

“When did I...”

“I’m not talking to you!” Calesco fumes, with the sound of a slamming door marking her mental exit.

Keris gets the mental impression of Eko shaking her head. Teenage sisters, Eko indicates wisely. They’re so temperamental and unreliable. Not at all like Eko, who’s so emotionally stable and reliable and trustworthy and really is the solid backbone holding Keris together.

Sighing, Keris checks the sky. There’s still a while to go before dawn and any response from Orange Blossom. She lets Rounen know that a message might be coming for him to write down, curls up on her side in bed, and steps into-

... a boulder.

“Ow,” Keris comments dryly after picking herself up. “So, you can do that trick too, huh? Haneyl barred me from stepping straight into her Tree when I visited the two of you there.”

The stone blocking the entrance to Calesco’s cave remains stubbornly silent.

“Look, I know you’re angry at me a lot, but I’m not sure what you think I did wrong this time,” Keris sighs. “It’s okay to miss your sister, Calesco. I miss her too. But she needs this trip; this time with Sasi. If only to learn how to be around humans without infecting them all and making herself a giant target.”

“I hate you. Go away! I’m not talking to you!” Calesco fumes.

Keris’s jaw tightens. She tries not to take it personally when Calesco says things like that, but... it still hurts.

“Can you at least teach me why?” she asks. “You exploded at Rathan and stormed off. He wasn’t even insulting you - not nearly as much as your normal arguments.”

“You want the truth?” Calesco shouts.

“Yes?”

“Why do you think I have a reason to be grumpy and upset and hurty and Rathan doesn’t?” Calesco says darkly. “You made me grow up, remember? I’m a girl thanks to you. So because of you and that growth spurt you made me have over Calibration... put it together, _Mother_. You’ve been pregnant for nearly a year, but you can’t have forgotten what girls do.”

Keris stares blankly. “Wait,” she stutters. “What? Already? But I didn’t... I never, until... not until I was years older than...”

Several bits of medical knowledge pop up helpfully in the back of her mind and wave. She winces. “Oh. Right. Malnourishment. And generally living like crap. And that bad fever when I was twelve probably didn’t help any, either. Urgh, I was a _mess_ back then.”

She shakes the thoughts off and looks up. “Right, um... I had actually forgotten. My monthlies didn’t come often when I was on the streets, and not until I was older than you look now. And as an Exalt they don’t hurt. But, mm. Hot things help; pressing them against your stomach. It sooths the cramps - at least for me, and you’ll probably be the same. And I can give you a massage, if you want. That always worked wonders when... when Rat did it.”

Apparently all Calesco really wanted was some mothering and to be talked out of the idea that Keris wanted her to suffer for... some reason. The persecution complex Calesco has is one of her least pretty traits, Keris feels. But regardless, once she’s been given some attention and Keris has helped advise some of the tar-cherubs on honey-sweetened things to help her feel better, she’s... well, still grumpy and moody, but not much more than Calesco usually is. They retire to a tar-pool where Keris arranges a cherub on Calesco’s lap, half in and half out of the pool. It - he, Keris thinks, though it’s hard to tell with these little amorphous creatures - quickly warms up to match the temperature of the pool, and she can tell that her daughter is enjoying the heat soaking into her.

“So,” she sighs, dangling her own feet just above the bubbling black liquid. “Kerisa is sweet and all, but we really should do something to help her long-term. The obsession with her parents is going to get her in real trouble someday, if she keeps trying to charge out and find them with Dragonblooded around.”

“I don’t know much about ghosts. Because you don’t know much about ghosts,” Calesco points out. “In retrospect, you probably should have read up on them in Hell when you were going to be pretending to be a deathknight. But... I think it’d be hard to persuade a little girl her parents aren’t coming back, and she’s a very old ghost. If she could change her mind, she would have.”

“I don’t mean talking her out of it, exactly...” Keris says, her mouth twisting. “... more... mm, I’m not sure. I mean, you said it right there; she _can’t_ change her mind. It’s in her nature to cling to things, like it’s in a sziromkerub’s nature to write stories. Hells, the best way to help her would be to stop her being a ghost, but that’s not really an option.” She huffs out an irritated breath.

Pauses.

Purses her lips.

“... then again... hmm. There’s no way I know of to bring the dead back to life, but a ghost is basically just a minor spirit. Dulmea said yidak are a bit like weak, mindless demons in a way. I wonder if you could change a ghost into another kind of spirit, if it was willing.”

She chews a lip for a moment, then shakes her head. “Something to think about, but I don’t want to be experimenting on Kerisa.” She shrugs, changing the subject to something more harmless. “What have you and your citizens been doing in Haneyl’s absence?”

Calesco’s eyes gleam white, bright and painful through her veil before she blinks. “You know,” Calesco says, thoughtfully, “you said that a sziromkerub can’t change their nature. But they can. Once, at least.”

“What are you saying?” Keris asks.

“... nothing really. I just wanted to correct you because you were wrong,” Calesco says.

((... oh, Calesco. That was both really profound and really petty.))   
((Calesco is very Calesco. Also, starlight slipped out.))   
((A hint of Truth? : 3))   
((maaaaaaaaybe))

Keris sleeps well for the first time since she got to this miserable, wet town. She really hopes that Baisha isn’t like this. It would ruin her memories if it turned out that she’d grown up in a horrible wet place in the fens.

“Mum, mum. You slept for ages.” Rounen is bouncing up and down in front of her. Looking out the window, it’s mid morning, she guesses - it’s just gloomy. “A blue tiger showed up and told me something.”

Her eyes widen. “Go on.”

((So, Keris needs to retroactively roll for the social attack she made at the end of last session. It’s a social attack using Per + Pres that seeks to make a new deal, enhanced with Charms as appropriate.))   
((3+5+2 stunt+2 PoEU autosux x2 HDT=10. Enhancing with PoEU (since she pinged the info for how much it was worth and knows it’s _red hot_ ) and HDT to encourage a new bargain. 7x2+4=18 sux.))

Rounen pulls out a very neatly transcribed message, which additionally has a picture of the large blue tiger drawn at the top.

“Keris Dulmeadokht,” the message says.

“You make the claim that you successfully infiltrated a Lookshyian facility and stole crucial information - information that might hurt Lookshy more than the death of a popular hero at the hands of an alleged deathknight.

“Very well. You make a good case. If you are willing to send an Infallible Messenger back to me where you avow what you have said is the truth, the full truth, and you lie neither by omission or by deliberate evasion or misrepresentation, then we can talk. If you send the message to me before noon, then we can meet in the Sceptred Leaf hotel in Terema, three days from now. If you are telling the truth, we can exchange the information.

“Does this please you?

“Orange Blossom”

Keris recalls Sasi’s trick for telling lies, and considering Orange Blossom is a Fiend, she’s probably learned a similar trick. It would make sense why she’s doing it.

She grins. It’s not a pleasant expression. “Oh, I’m quite happy to tell you that, Orange Blossom,” she says sweetly. “Right then. Rounen, stand back a bit. Kuha, you might want to see this. Firisutu!”

Her gold-and-silver monkey-familiar drops into her hair. From his chittering yawn, he’d been catching up on sleep in the Domain.

“Yeah yeah, sorry. I have a message for you to carry. Ready?”

Sulkily, he jumps off her and readies himself, cocking his skull-head attentively. Summoning up the sorcerous power of a messenger spell, Keris infuses it into him and waits for the glow to settle.

“Orange Blossom,” she says, once he rises up on his toes and shivers with the need to fly. “I’m not lying, evading or misdirecting you. I broke into the Lookshyian fort while the shozei was out and rifled through the documents of his military adjutant while she was distracted. The information I’ve got is red hot, and I covered my tracks well enough that I doubt they know I took it. Three days from now will do nicely. I’ll see you then.”

The sorcerous power wraps itself around Firisutu and sinks into him. He absorbs it, swelling in size somewhat, and glows with the colour of Keris’ anima. And then he’s off.

He returns an hour later. Orange Blossom can’t be too far away, across Creation’s scale - a matter of a few hundred miles away. Perhaps she’s even in Taira. And her answer follows him shortly, in the form of a great indigo tigress. “Then I will see you there. Meet me there at noon, and dress as if you were prosperous. I’ll be there as a Guild factor - you should have your own cover for when they ask you. A courtesan, perhaps. You look the type.”

Rathan hisses in anger at that comment.

“Just for that,” Keris says thoughtfully, “I’m going to _gouge_ her if she wants the shozei dead as well.”

“You were gonna gouge her anyway,” Vali points out, not looking up from the work he’s doing on a little brass leg for his cat. Iosoto is attempting to nibble on Keris’s ankles; still frustrated by the fact that his teeth can’t get through her skin.

She shrugs. “Okay, so now I’m going to gloat more about gouging her. And do it harder. Wealthy musician, do you think?” she adds to Rathan. “Or healer? I can play either.”

“You and Rathan think what she said was an insult,” Vali says. “But I don’t think she really meant you should do it. She was just doing it to be mean. So given she didn’t want you to really do it, you should do it and do it even more than she’d think and then if she gets angry you can just tell her you were doing what she said.”

((and so orange blossom accidentally cinnamon))

Keris considers this. On the one hand, he’s probably right. On the other hand... well, on the other hand, she’s not a courtesan! She doesn’t sell her company like that! Or her body, either!

... though to be fair, she’s not a Sijanese priestess either. And it’s not like it would be real. And she could probably embarrass Orange Blossom if she arrived looking wealthy but also sort of tasteless - because it would make the other woman look like the kind of person who’d hire someone like that.

Hmm.

Three days later, a woman walks into the Sceptred Leaf. She’s a Tairan native; with dark skin and grey eyes, but her hair falls down to her knees in a thick braid, much-adorned with silver ornaments and flowers. Her dark red dress is undoubtedly rich; loose around her midriff to downplay her pregnancy, embroidered with gold thread in patterns that few would trace to the southwest of Creation and tastefully enhanced by a cluster of pinhead gems here and there, but its cut is just shy of scandalous. The body art hinted at beneath it - though never quite discernable enough to make out any details - is even more so, and the lazy smile the woman wears speaks of exotic allure and tempting mysteries.

She introduces herself as Tenné Cinnamon.

((Per + Expression for her impact on the place, enhance with Charms as desired.))   
((... I’m very tempted to drop Attention-Holding Grace. Hmm. Would that allow Keris and Orange Blossom to still have a conversation without eavesdroppers? Well, I guess they could have a meal and then talk in private, especially if Keris doesn’t bullshit-overpower the roll.   
... so yeah. Heh. 3+5+3 Exotic Beauty+1 bonus {first impressions}+2 stunt=14. 7 sux.   
Enhanced by Attention-Holding Grace, which Keris is holding back on with just a basic 3+5=8 roll; 3 sux.))

Keris sashays in. More than a little bit, she’s copying how Sasi does things when she really wants to make an entrance - and she’s not even trying her hardest. She’s saving her real effort for the negotiations with Orange Blossom. But it’s still enough that the doormen at this establishment let her through without a question. So many eyes are turned towards her, especially those of the serving staff and those who - despite the fact it’s merely noon - are already heavy in their cups. This is an expensive place, but that just means that the wealthy who come here to trade and make deals in Terema indulge at all hours.

And it certainly is wealthy. After removing her shoes, Keris walks on tiger-skin rugs from the southern jungles of Taira. The wall hangings are northern Tairan, while there’s silverwork everywhere. It’s a gorgeous place, this hotel - and Orange Blossom has always been good at getting her hands on money. Maybe she even owns it, because one of the things she does for the Reclamation is sourcing money in Creation.

She introduces herself to a second set of guards, and informs them that Cinnamon Tenné is here to see Orange Blossom.

The one on the right is just blinking along, but the hard-faced dark skinned woman - probably a Harbourhead mercenary - is less weak willed. “For what purpose should I tell her?” she says, looking Keris up and down.

“A private meeting,” Keris tells her with a meaningful lilt. “Arranged in advance. She’s expecting me.”

It is somewhat hard to actually convey this message because the messengers get distracted and stop paying attention to the message they’re meant to be conveying, but once Keris explicitly tells them to carry the message things clear up.

She’s shown into a private room with Orange Blossom. It’s a windowless room where the air is thick with incense and the walls are inset with what the ill-educated might think are statues of gods. But Keris knows better. Those aren’t mere gods.

Orange Blossom herself is dressed in gold-trimmed indigo, in robes that look like perhaps they were originally meant to be loose, but she’s tailored them to fit every contour of her body. Her eyes are marked with kohl; her nails are painted with gold flakes.

And from her momentarily startled expression, Vali was right - she didn’t expect Keris to show up dressed like this, with such an affected sultry mannerism.

“Well,” Keris says, with _exactly_ the right mix of impish innocence and seductive lilt. “I’m here, _just_ like you asked me to be.” Her gold-painted lips curl in a smug smile. “And the two of us all alone here in private. Shall we get down to business?”

She can see the innuendos hitting home. Every word can be defended as innocent - but the double-meanings must burn.

Taking one of the cups of spirits on the table - chalcanth, from the smell of it which means she’s either making it or importing it from hell - Orange Blossom gives it a thoughtful swirl. “So, you were telling the truth about the theft from the Lookshyians.” Reaching under the table, she rests a slim scroll in front of her. “The information on Baisha. So, let’s see how much you have.”

Keris pulls the file out of her hair, separates out several of the most important documents - the ones that state the Lookshyian missions - and pushes them across the table. “So that you know what I’m offering. These,” she waves the rest of the files, “are the deployment details. In-depth orders, names, field strength, equipment; the works.” She eyes the scroll over to her with a hair tendril, but - with a titanic effort of will - waits to grab for it as Orange Blossom skims the first few papers.

“Is there any chance... any chance at _all_... that this was false information set out to bait you?” Orange Blossom says, carefully putting them down. Her voice is so rigid and controlled that it’s almost a tell in itself.

“Hmm,” Keris says. She is, she finds with mild surprise, _really enjoying herself_. It’s fun, needling Orange Blossom like this. And having the upper hand in the dialogue is great. “Well, it was on the desk of a Dragonblooded military adjutant, on the top floor of a warded military citadel designed to be impenetrable to scrying, behind the walls of a star fort full of Lookshyian soldiers. Oh, and there were bound demons watching the roof and outer bailey, and lookouts on the walls. I had to steal it from almost directly under the Water-Aspect’s nose, and I was deep inside the castle with only one route out when I did it.”

She threads her fingers together. “If it was false intel set out with the knowledge I was coming, I’m having trouble understanding why they didn’t slam the door shut behind me as soon as I took it. It’s really not often that I let myself be that vulnerable to getting penned in.”

“Who could have known that you were in there?” Orange Blossom presses.

Keris purses her lips, mind jumping to Illana. She almost lies... but urgh, no, dammit. Stupid lie-detection. “There’s one merchant in the area I’m working with - lying about what I am, obviously, but she has designs on stealing from Eshtock as well, and I decided it was better to know what she was planning than risk her plan running over mine. But as far as she knew; I had no plans on going for the fort. I took one look at it when I reached Saha and decided it was too well-defended - Eshtock itself was the safer target to explore. Hells, I took a _second_ look at it and called it too risky. I only went back on a whim when I got spooked by a near miss from the shozei and realised he’d be tied up with the naib for the next hour or two. Not even my familiars knew I was making my run then - it was too short-notice.”

((Per + Politics to deflect.))   
((3+5+3 Mendaciloquent Maverick+1 bonus {no outright falsehoods}+2 stunt+8 Adorjani ExD {restless, unconsidered variable, shreds the best-laid plans, vicious whimsy}=22. 8 sux.))   
((Heh. Keris’s own Adorjani nature meant that it genuinely was basically a spur-of-the-moment decision to hit the fort.))   
((And she got... 7 successes on her Reaction + Politics.))   
((Oh, Keris and ur “lying to people who have explicit truth-detection charms” skills.))

Orange Blossom tilts her head. “Shall we make a deal, perhaps? I will release you from the oath we swore where you’d kill the Lookshyian and in return I’d give you the information you wish. Instead, I’ll take this information as my price - on one condition. Should it prove false or a plant by Lookshyian intelligence or one of those star-chosen sniffing around this place, you’ll owe me an equivalent favour for the assassination you should have done. Does that sound fair?”

“Well, let’s not be so hasty,” Keris smiles. “I’m still in a viable place to kill the shozei. If _you_ wanted to owe _me_ a favour. And I can do something else that might interest you, too.”

“Oh?” Orange Blossom sits back, her chalcanth still undrunk. She lights up a perfumed cigarillo - that must be what the smell is in here.

Gold-painted lips pull back over gleaming teeth. “I think I can take down the mists at Eshtock,” Keris says. “And if I do it after killing the shozei; the Lookshyian forces will be in disarray. You’ll be able to move in - both on the city itself, and on the region as the weather re-stabilises. That working is what’s sucking up all the moisture from the surrounding mountains and turning the valley into a swamp. With it gone; the region will become fertile land again - ripe for a merchant princess to move in on.”

((PoEU to see what that’s worth to her.))

Keris’ stomach sinks as she realises the truth in the moment just before Orange Blossom speaks.

((Resources 0 for breaking the mists))

“Why would I want that?” she asks, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “There’s a civil war here, and the mists are what are keeping the treasures inside safe. The secret of how the Lookshyians are getting in is worth far more than the destruction of the barrier. I dare say I could work it out given time, but if you did find me the secret, I’d make it worth your time.”

Keris purses her lips. “I know how their method functions, if not how it works,” she temporises, hoping the other woman hasn’t realised her own motivation for breaking the mists. “I broke through the mists myself, the hard way, and explored the city a little. It’s full of Contagion-Dead, incidentally. Tens of thousands of them, locked up in towers and kept in only by running water. Not to mention the... shit, right.”

She hesitates, but... this information probably isn’t worth haggling over. It’s important, and it’s dangerous, and Orange Blossom is frankly in a better position to deal with it than Keris is. “Urgh... fine, this information I’m not going to haggle for - there may be something else there. Something a lot more dangerous than the mists, something that the Lookshyians could already have found. There are tens of thousands of petrified fae up there - all turned to stone in an instant, and all facing _away_ from the city. They would have been a _carpet_ of chaos-kin when they were alive, Orange Blossom; a carpet covering the valley completely. And every last one I saw was fleeing Eshtock when they were petrified. The mists are a defensive weapon; they’re slow and they don’t kill or harm directly. If the Lookshyians have already found whatever did _that_...”

Orange Blossom purses her lips. “Hopefully it was a weapon exhausted by its use,” she says, “because if it was not, there’s a terrible risk they already have recovered it. After all, they’ve had access to the city for months.”

“That’s what I’m worried about. They’d have taken it down to the fort if they had - maybe even sent it off to Lookshy. I didn’t see it in the camp, but I’m not willing to make another run on the fort to check their stockpile there. The first time was tense enough.”

“So. Speaking purely hypothetically, what would you want in return for killing the shozei?” Orange Blossom asks, sucking in on her cigarello.

Keris grins. “An equivalent favour? Hmm.” She taps her chin mockingly, then grows more serious. “Alright, let me think for a moment.”

She chews it over. Really, there’s only one thing that Orange Blossom can offer that’s of significant and pressing value to Keris: support in protecting her family from the politics of Hell. The only issue is; telling her that involves telling her _about_ Keris’s souls - and that, Keris is loathe to do.

... then again...

“... I’m pregnant,” she says bluntly. “When my children are born, their status may be in jeopardy from... certain parties in Hell. I’m sure a few names spring to mind - I won’t speak them. Should any parties in the Althing move against me, to try and bind these children or any others of mine and make them subservient to the will of the Unquestionable; I would want your backing in opposing it.”

Orange Blossom sits back. “This means a lot to you,” she says, thoughtfully. “More than it should on the face of it. I feel there’s something you’re omitting.”

Keris nods freely enough. “There is. I’m not sure whether I can trust you enough to tell you.” She rolls her eyes. “Though I don’t doubt that it’s information that’ll interest you. Not many know it.”

“You’re asking for me to potentially stand against the Unquestionable,” she points out, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “The question is always if you want me as a friend or you want things to be kept at arm’s reach. Like they have been since you thrust me away.”

There’s a pause. Keris’s eyes flicker down, then up again. The silence stretches.

“... has Lilunu congratulated you,” she asks - slowly, carefully; each word formed and released like a vitriol drop among mountains of algarel, “on becoming multitudes?”

Orange Blossom sits back, silent for a whole minute. The lack of noise stretches onwards. “My own sweet emissary is daubed in carmine and roses,” she says, eventually.

The breath that rushes out of Keris turns her from a tense, rigid statue into an almost boneless form. “How many do you have? There are six within me, beyond Dulmea.”

“Within?” She frowns. “What do you mean by that?”

Another silence. But this one is shorter. “There is a... sanctum of sorts, within my souls. Lilunu calls it a dream,” Keris says. “Within that domain, they live, and play, and... squabble. I visit them when I meditate, or in my sleep.”

She lifts a hand, and a rent in the air along with a warning bar of music deposits a cup of sparkling emerald-hued tea in it. She takes a sip.

“But it’s more than just a mortal’s dream,” she finishes. “It’s real.”

Orange Blossom raises both eyebrows. “My... servants are my familiars. I call them forth at the new moon, should I need them - demons from my mind.”

Keris nods. “Mine first learned to step forth from my soul this Althing past. But they’re not my familiars, Orange Blossom - they’re my children. And there are those among the Unquestionable who would demand that the souls of we peers should be bound and shackled to the will of the Reclamation. You know the Blue Glass Maiden would wish it so.”

“It is none of their concern,” Orange Blossom counters, shaking her head. “They serve me, not the Unquestionable. They are my familiars, only separate from me when I wish.”

“... I gave Sasi permission to summon my souls, though not to bind them,” Keris says quietly. “It worked. Were I forced to swear such oaths to another, I have no doubt they could be ordered to manifest. I see no reason why the same might not apply to yours. Are you willing to take the risk that I am wrong?”

“Besides, I’ve named my price and you understand why it concerns me so. I would ask that you say nothing of my children - some among the Unquestionable know of them already, but I would rather they be allowed... privacy. They are young, still, and were they to be hurt...”   
The silent promise of slaughter goes unspoken, but not unheard.

“Sit, drink, enjoy yourself for a while.” Orange Blossom takes the documents, and passes the scroll on Baisha. She reaches out, and takes Keris’ hand. “I release you of your oath, as long as this evidence proves true,” she says, and Keris feels her hand tingle. “We’ll talk afterwards. It is possible I may not want him dead if this news would make him a tarnished hero and a mark of Lookshyian perfidy. But if you want a favour such as that, I’ll be able to find a use for you.”

She pauses.

“As for the question of Baisha,” she says, voice quiet, “the key to it was when I managed to recognise the traces of your accent in a region of Taira. They call it Baisha there, yes - but that’s not what the people in the capital or the maps call it. They record it as Vesha. The local accent is different from the way things are written. Perhaps that’s why you couldn’t find it.”

That gets a quiet, emphatic curse from Keris as she devours the information on the scroll. “I scoured every map of the Scavenger Lands I could lay my hands on,” she admits. “Right down to the trade-town level. You said there are still people there?”

“I didn’t go myself, but my agent said there were people there. The market town showed signs of previous fire and damage, but everything does in that area of Taira. The biggest fighting may be further south, but the bits of the north like that have degenerated to banditry and petty lords raiding and slaving. The Shahbanu’s only recently spread her control back over the entire region - it’s been chaos for decades.”

Keris nods quietly, finishing the scroll and then rereading it before stowing it in her hair. After a moment, she looks up.

“Orange Blossom,” she says, low and intense. “You know what I’m going to do with this, don’t you? The people who took me; they’re still doing it. Those slave-trade routes won’t have gone anywhere. The easiest way to find my family is to follow that trail from the beginning. And you have to know I won’t leave the slavers alone as I go.”

“Of course they’ve gone places,” Orange Blossom says, attention half-distracted by the documents. “This is Taira, Keris. Lords and princes have always stolen serfs from one another, or traded them to settle debts. It long predates the shahs when they came from the north. It’s just that in the civil war, everyone is selling.”

“The route up the Grey River will have stayed, though,” says Keris darkly. “And I’ll follow it.”

Orange Blossom either doesn’t hear her, or doesn’t think much of it. She excuses herself, and is gone for almost two hours, leaving Keris to the luxuries of this place. Wine, food, _hot baths_ and any companionship she could ask for.

She’s feeling impish enough about the Cinnamon guise that she plays into it; flirting, dazzling and enthralling without regard for target or propriety. It’s surprisingly fun! Most of her food and drinks are free - she only needs to breathily mention that she wants the most expensive black tea on the menu, and three men all but fight for the honour of providing her with one! A casual comment about how her feet are aching gets her a woman to rub them - albeit not as well as one of her own Gales could manage.

And when Keris deigns to reward her entourage with some harp music... _well_.

She makes a particularly good impression on a hard-faced woman with dark skin, a scar that took her left eye, and her hair done in a more elaborate version of the cornrows she’s seen Harborite mercenaries. Unlike the more merchant-like people here, she has real muscles, Keris notes, and keeps her weapons close to hand. She introduces herself as General Nandi Zwiswayo.

“And what brings you here, Lady Cinnamon?” she asks, flashing golden dentures. Keris thinks they’re a replacement for a battle injury.

((Keris has probably heard what name Orange Blossom is using here - what is it?))   
((It’s just Orange Blossom - Keris vaguely recalls her mentioning that she just picked up her old life - only now as an Exalt.))

“Oh, business,” she says, savouring the tea and favouring the woman with an appraising smile. “A meeting with Orange Blossom - she asked me here for a private talk. And yourself?”

She rests scabbed hands on her knees, and grins. “Rest and relaxation for my girls after two seasons out in Taira. And looking for someone new to hire us. The pay is good when those tight-fisted naibs don’t try to cheat you. When they do - hah, we take our pay from them.” She lets out a short barked laugh. “We’re the Bloody Lionesses. Tell your friends that if we’re looking for mercenaries, we’re the best around. Me and most of the other leaders were Brides when we were younger women, and we take women who don’t want to live the life of a Bride and want fame and pay our way and train them just as good as we got in the temples. That means we have to let off steam every few months, ha!”

Looking over her weapons and muscle tone, Keris can well believe it. Turning more of her charm on, she leads Nandi into recounting some tales of past exploits in far-flung regions, and has Dulmea make a reminder to look into mercenary groups over in the Southwest when she goes back there.

“And what would your intentions be when you move on?” Nandi asks after a while. “Would you be looking for bodyguards? From your expensive dress, you could well do with a few of my ferocious fighting women to safeguard you and my lionesses are not prone to the ways of men.” She smiles as she adds, “A face as pretty as yours must attract unwelcome attention as well as wanted attention.”

Keris lets herself blush prettily, and considers it. It’s at least worth seeing how far they’re willing to stray from Harborhead, she decides. Some decent mercenaries from her homeland would be a nice asset if they were willing to follow her all the way back to the Southwest. “I actually mean to head westward along the southern coast,” she says. “As far as my journey takes me - perhaps even until I hit the Western ocean, if there’s nowhere worth stopping and settling. How far would your Lionesses be willing to accompany me, if I were to ask?”

“Hah! We go as far as the pay takes us. There’s nothing left in Harbourhead for most of my girls. Though go too far, and I’ll want hazard pay for getting them back.” She pauses. “Unless a lady of your... profession was thinking of putting our entire company in contact with a client and it’s worth relocating,” she adds, leaning forwards, eyes narrowed. “Taira is tired, and the money is running out. Fresh fields might suit us.”

“Taira is tired,” Keris agreed, taking another sip of tea. “And if I had a client in mind, what kind of money would they need to be offering, for fresh fields to appeal to you and your girls? How many lionesses make up your pride?”

They talk business. Keris finds they’re a low strength dragon’s worth - perhaps four hundred women, of whom three hundred or so are medium infantry and a hundred are scout cavalry. To hire them for a whole year would cost maybe twenty five silver talents a year. Less for a smaller group - perhaps a single silver talent a year for a small group of bodyguards.

((Resources 4 levels of payment required to keep the whole formation hired. Resources 3 for a bodyguard force.))   
((Hmm. Interesting. Quite possibly, after some sailing-training, a potential crew for that fleet of hers.))   
((Or an occupying force if she wanted to take over a small island, yes. Like, say Maza, that island I wrote up with the chattel slavery - they could basically keep that island subjugated because it’s not militarily strong, maybe reinforced with some cheaper local mercenaries))

Keris doesn’t promise anything - Cinnamon, after all, cannot make promises on behalf of a client - but she does imply that she has a person in mind who might well be able to hire them. She sets the idea aside to mull over later - along with cover stories and transport to the Southwest and other such fiddly details - as Orange Blossom returns.

Then she’s back into Orange Blossom’s lavish room. The other woman seems buzzing, even excited.

“I’ve read your files in full, and this is potentially very useful indeed,” she says. “It’s proof that Lookshy is in fact sending hidden troops out to plunder people who are currently hiring them. There’s always been rumours of it, but this is orders right from the top. As blackmail material, it’s firedust. So as part of our agreement, I’m going to have to insist that for it to remain valuable, you not report it. Don’t worry about telling the All-Thing. This is my area of operations, so I’ll handle telling which Unquestionable need to know.” She swallows, looking slightly sour. “In return for that, I’ll put in a glowing report with Lilunu praising you for how you handled yourself and your professionalism. Does that sound satisfactory to you?”

Keris nods. “That sounds like a fair trade. I’ll keep my mouth shut about it.” She purses her lips. “I want to move after Baisha as soon as possible, but I will be going back to Saha and up to Eshtock once more before leaving - and like I said, I’ve done the setup work to kill the shozei and frame Thorns. Have you made a decision on whether or not you want it done?”

Sitting back, Orange Blossom lights up another cigarillo. “With the evidence linking the shozei to this, I don’t want him dead. He’s compromised. I can use this to get my hooks into him, because if it got out, Lookshy would have to pretend that he went rogue - and that’d mean he’d need to fall on his blade, on orders. No, there’s something more pressing here.” She exhales a cloud of bluish smoke. “We can still leave Lookshy hating Thorns and also push them to retreat from Eshtock. You’ve shown you can get into their bases, yes?”

“They’ve good security, and it was tense, but yes. Especially if I hit them while the main strength is out on patrol or at a meeting with the naib.”

“I want access to Eshtock, and I want to deny them a chance to loot any more.” Orange Blossom leans forwards, and for a moment, the light from above on her mane of hair makes her look like the great tigress in her anima banner. “There are twenty five people there from their engineering corps. The three Dragonblooded there are all sorcerers, and the others are trained thaumaturges, specialists, and siege engineers. They’re expensive. Can’t be replaced without getting reinforcements from Lookshy. They’ll probably have to abandon this fort if they lose their specialists, as they won’t be able to maintain the warding or anything else like that.”

She taps ash off her cigarillo. “Kill them all, or bring a few to me as captives. And steal me their notes.”

Keris grins. “Oh, _that_ I can do. With pleasure. Though, wait a moment...” She thinks back. “There was the Karal woman in charge, the stronger Fire-Aspect she was with; both up in the Eshtock camp... which one’s the last sorcerer?”

“Nerigus Sashi, a Wood Aspect. You’ll need to be careful with her, though. Her twin sister, Nerigus Rini, is also posted here and is also aspected to Wood. Make sure you hit the right target.”

“Baby Face has a twin?” Keris wrinkles her nose. “Urgh. Well, the one I saw up in the Eshtock camp was as weak as a strong serf - so was Karal, actually. The Fire-Aspect and the shozei are both more like demon lords. I’ll listen in on a few names and figure it out that way.”

“And for that, I believe my silence on the topic of the fact that you can externalise your souls too is what you asked for?” she says.

“Your silence, and your help if a motion comes up in the Althing to try and shackle them. I’m not asking you to outright go against the Unquestionable, but aid behind the scenes; that sort of thing.” Keris meets her eye. “You might say that it won’t come up or that yours couldn’t be bound that way; fine. But if it _does_ come up and they _do_ try to chain my children, what does that mean for the rest of us peers? If a decision like that goes through once - never mind that they wouldn’t be able to follow through on it - it means it’s easier for a decision like it to get made again.”

Orange Blossom narrows her eyes. “And how likely do you think a motion like that is to come about?” she asks. “Not to mention that if it does come about, it’ll be decided behind the scenes by the Unquestionable. You’re asking a lot by asking me to effectively reveal the existence of my souls to fight against something we have no real way of changing.” She taps ash off her cigarillo. “Wouldn’t my silence, plus - oh, say, a manse in Malfeas - be more _guaranteed_ as useful to you? I have quite a few you might like.”

“I never suggested you reveal your own souls, though I can’t see why you’ve kept them hidden if you feel there’s nothing to fear,” Keris points out. “And if I wanted another manse in Malfeas, I’d have one. It’s not like I haven’t been made the offer. You’re smart, and you have a lot of power and territory in Hell, not to mention probably a fair few favours. Your voice isn’t something that’ll go ignored. If it doesn’t come up...” She shrugs. “You have some dead Lookshyian sorcerer-engineers for no cost to you. But I have reassurance that there’s one more person I can trust where my kids are concerned.”

“You’re asking for something I can’t and won’t give.” Her refusal seems absolutely adamant.

((Reaction + Politics to discern what she’s so unwavering about.))   
((5+1+2 Coadj+2 stunt+3 Kimmy ExSux {self-defined victim, secrets}=10. 1? _1?_ 1+3=4, COME ON, dice fairies! Wtf?))

Keris huffs irritably. What is Orange Blossom’s problem with this? It’s not like she’s even asking all that much! Has the other Infernal made some sort of promise to someone else, or is she just scared? Or is it some sort of personal grudge against Keris that’s holding her back from actually _helping_ \- it wouldn’t be the first time she’d been pointlessly bitchy or unavailable and withheld help.

But something within Keris recognises the same refusal - not through her own skill, but through the nature of Kimbery that flows through her veins. It’s the same certainty that fills her when people dare suggest she betray her loved ones. The exact same certainty.

((Keris concludes that she’s learned Mother Before Daughter and considers what Keris asks of her to be betraying a loved one.))   
((... crap. So, mm. Probably one of her souls, and she thinks it would expose her own to danger.))   
((I had said before that she favours Kimmy. :p ))

It’s probably one of her souls - or all of them - Keris realises. She loves them just as Keris loves hers, and is certain that supporting Keris would be putting them in danger.

Which... which is _so fucking hypocritical!_ Keris is asking for the same thing Orange Blossom wants! But she’s withholding her help just because it would... urgh! Such a bitch!

“Your silence about my souls for my silence about yours,” she grinds out, frustrated beyond belief. “And a favour owed, then. I can’t be sure my search for family will bear fruit, and your reach found Baisha where I couldn’t.”

“A favour similar in scale to that which you have done for me,” Orange Blossom confirms.

Keris nods tersely. “Agreed.”

“Very well.” Orange Blossom pauses. “I suppose I should leave you a contact point for Infallible Messengers, then. I’d rather not have you take control of my dreams again.”

“Hey, it’s subtler than a Messenger,” Keris smirks. “Can’t be overheard, either. But yes. You can generally send messages to Rounen; he’ll write them down for me if I’m with mortals at the time.”

“Before you leave, then, I’ll have someone leave my contact details with you.” She sighs, voice painfully polite. “Now, you’re welcome to enjoy the hospitality of this place for today and tonight, at your leisure. If you’ll excuse me, I have other people to meet today.”


	7. Chapter 7

On her way back to Saha and Eshtock; slumped over Cissidy’s back and supported by Kuha behind her, Keris faces a problem. Her Lance is too recognisable; too saturated in demon venoms and not really believable enough as a weapon that might be used by a deathknight from Thorns. Likewise, if she uses Ascending Air, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll be recognised - and she _really_ doesn’t want that.

So she needs a substitute.

As a result, she ventures once again into the fog-bound realm beyond the territory of her children-souls, in search of treasure there. For once, the bitchy snake seems to be... well, not bitchy. It’s actually in a fairly good mood, in fact. She can hear it crooning to itself in the fog - for some reason its voice carries abnormally far when all other sound is deadened by the stifling mists - with a sort of smug, trilling purr. Probably riding the high of pulling one over Orange Blossom.

Keris is not going to argue with this unexpected good fortune, and wastes no time casing its various stashes. They’re no longer hidden in ice like they were before the Domain expanded, she notes, and seem to have been relocated to the middle of the thickest fog belts; the dense areas that never move and which try to rip the breath right out of your lungs.

They’re not a very good defence against someone who breathes dead people. And she’s incredibly lucky, because the second cloud she tries is the one where, among all the muted clinks of untold wealth beneath her feet and the barely discernable glint of Malfean emeralds and silver piled up in heaps, she trips over a long hard pole of some sort and runs a hand down it to find an orichalcum blade.

Perfect. She’s sure she’s heard of deathknights going after Solar tombs - and after all, she did too - and it’s obvious as soon as she retreats back to the City that this thing _screams_ Solar. It’s gorgeous, and Keris genuinely regrets the fact that her po is probably going to throw a massive tantrum and force her to give it back as soon as it gets over its smugness and notices the thing is gone.

She leaves the spear with Dulmea as she drifts back to the waking world and prudently pulls it out as soon as she wakes to discourage Pekhijira from going after it. And, well. She’ll probably have to give it back, but a few sketches of the design can’t hurt, right?

It’s raining in Saha when Keris returns. Thick dark clouds obscure the sky and leave it in perpetual twilight. The only bright light is the occasional flashes of lightning and booming thunder that leave Keris wincing.

“Wonderful,” Kuha says, putting the full force of her withering contempt into it as she wraps her cloak around her tighter. “Just wonderful.”

Kerisa, for her part, seems rather happier that the sun isn’t out and about. She’s even floating around during the day, although she does seem confused about where all the roads and the trains have gone. Keris decides that a history lesson for her can wait, and holds a quick and deadly serious conference with Kuha.

“This is it, I think,” she says. “The sorcerer-engineers are up in Eshtock right now, and this storm will make it harder to get any reinforcements up there in a hurry. So I’m making my attack run _now_. If I’m lucky, most of the corps will be isolated up there and I can take them out quickly and brutally, then raid the fort again to kill the last few stragglers. Either way, it’s all going down in the next few hours. I need _you_ to hang tight here and plot us an aerial course to Baisha with what Orange Blossom gave me on its location. As soon as I’m finished here; we’re making a quick stop back in Terema to give her what she wants and then setting off.”

“Where will you be going first?” Kuha asks Keris softly. “Their great stone house or the old ruins? And where do you want me to wait. It is raining and I do not want my maps to get hurt.”

“The ruins, unless the shozei is out again,” Keris says. “I think you can head back to our room for the moment - we’ll probably be gone by tomorrow. If...” She licks her lips. “If I don’t, you know... come back... it’s not likely, Kuha, don’t look at me like that; I’m _going_ to come back. But as a just-in-case, if I don’t; have Cissidy take you and Rounen and Kerisa to Terema, find Orange Blossom and tell her what happened. Tell her to get you all to Sasi as a way of settling any debts that remain between us. Sasi will take care of you; you can trust her.”

Kuha flinches, and tugs on Keris’ sleeve, eyes wide. “You’re not going to die,” she says with absolute faith.

“Don’t die. It hurts a lot,” Kerisa agrees. “And we need to find my parents too, before you’re allowed to die.”

Keris drops kisses on both of their foreheads, as well as Rounen’s. “I’m not going to die,” she agrees. “But Sasi’s been nagging me about planning better, even for things that aren’t going to happen. Kuha, I’ll want to see that map when I get back. Kerisa; could you tell Rounen some stories about your home when you were alive? Not many people remember the Shogunate now, and it might help with finding your parents if we knew all about them.”

Reassurances given and a last - temporary - goodbye made, she wraps a quick and dirty swaddling of fabric around her new spear, slings it over her back, and and sets out for her second target. Which will also be her last stop before heading up the mountain. Hopefully, Illana won’t be busy with anything this time.

When Keris stops by the marketplace, it’s shut down. Purple waterproof bindings cover the shop fronts, keeping out the rain. Illana’s caravan doesn’t seem to be open for business, and Keris can’t hear her among the men and women who are under cover in their wagons, smoking and playing cards. She’s either in the secret wagon, or maybe she’s just not here at all and is using the cover of the storm to get her own investigations done. Keris tries knocking on her caravan - and then shouldering one of the walls in case knocking doesn’t work, but decides that if the Lunar isn’t here, she isn’t here. Keris doesn’t have the time to go hunting down a random bird when their alliance is only tentative.

The door pokes open. “What do you want?” Illana snaps. With the door open, Keris can hear that there are two women in there. “I’m busy!”

“New orders from the boss,” she says quietly. “I’m making my run on the valley. Now. If you want to ride along while I punch through the fog, it’s now or never, because I just lost the luxury of doing this the slow way.”

“Who is this?” asks the other woman in the caravan, hovering behind Illana. Keris gets a fleeting glimpse of her - big, blonde-haired, lavender-eyed, features looking like she’s from the Scavenger Lands or maybe a bit further north and the hint of the kind of accent someone acquires when they learn Rivertongue in Nexus - as she takes Keris in. “And what is she doing with that hair?”

“A contact,” Illana says shortly. “And no, I’m not ready yet,” she says. “What are you even doing? What orders?”

Keris eyes the new woman in return. “Nothing I’ll say in front of a stranger,” she says equally shortly. “But it looks like our trade might fall through - I’ve been called away. If you’re not ready yet, I’ll regret the missed chance, but I suppose there’s no helping it.”

“Oh well. Thank you for the warning, at least,” Illana says. “Is what you’re about to do likely to make the Lookshyians start butchering perfectly innocent merchants? I have some interest if it is.”

“Nothing I’m going to do, but keep your head down anyway. There might be someone else operating in the area,” Keris says. “ _Something_ just changed the plan, but I don’t know much about the new one and what I do know I literally can’t tell you.” She offers a nod of respect. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Illana Javi, and I wish you the best.”

“And you too. Make it out of the other side of what madcap thing you’re up to, and we might talk again.” She smiles quietly. “Try to resist the urge to steal the weapons out of their hands. I speak from personal experience when I say that Dragonblooded have a firmer grasp.”

“No promises!” Keris grins, already moving off. She lingers in the marketplace just long enough to shift guise and let the salt-seller see her Sijanese persona with a less crudely swaddled spear; the heads covered but the shaft mostly bare. Then she ghosts out of town and heads up the mountain; starting at a light jog and rapidly building up to a flat-out sprint.

There’s a little bit of Keris that feels good to be alone. No one relying on her. No one holding her back. Just free to run on. She can’t say that sometimes it drags on her to be held back by having to keep Kuha tailing behind.

Nah, Eko wisely gestures, that’s kinda boring. The reason to run, she indicates with a casual flick of her hair, is to get to new places with new fun stuff. Places to see, things to steal, people to murder. Go, mama, she gestures! Go murder new people for fun and stabbing!

“I’m murdering them for more than fun and stabbing,” Keris murmurs with a smile. “Little pest. I also want their notes. But yes. Here come the mists again. Are you ready?”

Eko nods, and casually adds that she’s got Zanara standing by to make embroideries of the best scenes of murder that mama sees and also commits.

((Cog + Survival to advance, -8 external penalty from the potent magic that’s present.))   
((Heh. Any bonus from having done it once before?))   
((Nope. Maaaaaaagic.))   
((Dang it. Okay... I think this counts as one of the rare times Keris is _absolutely focused_ , so.   
4+3+2 stunt+7 Adorjani ExD {catastrophe and calamity, balancing force of wickedness}=16. 10-8=2 sux, phew. Just barely squeaked it.))

The fog descends a lot faster this time. Maybe it’s because Keris hits the edge of the effect at a full sprint or maybe it’s because it recognises her from last time, but the mists close in with even more unnatural speed than she remembers. But this time, Keris isn’t playing around or being cautious. She’s absolutely focused on her task, and this time she’s come to kill.

Once again, she breaks the fog wall from the inside. It’s even darker in here than usual - it might as well be night. The bioluminescent fungi growing on the rot and squalor of this lost city seem dimmer than usual, as if they themselves are hiding from the storm. This time she’s emerged down in the valley itself, rather than on the slopes, on a broken-up and ruined ancient road that still shows some of its quality. The rivers that repeatedly cross it and some of the old slabs have buckled into sinkholes.

Down in the valley, the bodies of the fae lie so thick that they are the floor. The mud from landslides has welled around them, and Keris can hear each footstep squelch mud onto calcified chaos-spawn. There are bodies down there, too, and lost and submerged Shogunate armour. From the way the landscape has been shifted, Keris thinks that the Lookshyians might have started digging through this area first. The bodies thin up ahead, but she thinks that may have been where the main body of the Shogunate soldiers made their stand before they were flanked by the monsters coming down the slopes.

Poor bastards, she thinks. Still, she applauds their courage. Or their desperation.

Now then. The sorcerers soon, but first... if she’s going into a serious fight, she wants her armour. Sinking into one of the rivers, she takes her amulet off, slides her armour on, and begins to connect her soul to both it and the new spear.

... with some regret, she also retracts the possessive tendrils of self that are wound around her Lance; leaving it safe in Dulmea’s keeping. She’s been bonded to her favoured weapon pretty much without a break since the day she found it, and letting go feels like prying half-calcified fingers open one by one, but she can only afford to be joined with one weapon for a fight like this.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers to it, petting the blade like a kitten and kissing the weighted end. “I’ll embrace you again as soon as I’m done here, I promise.”

“It’s just as well Haneyl isn’t here,” Rathan says archly. “She couldn’t resist taking it for herself.”

“So, what is your plan?” Dulmea interrupts. Her tone is clipped and precise. “Cause a disaster and make the dragonblooded tire themselves out before picking them off? Tricking one of them into casting a spell and exploiting the vulnerability of the sorcerer to kill them when they cannot defend themselves? Releasing the Dead? What, child?”

“Same plan as I started with,” Keris mutters. “Illana’s complaints weren’t ever going to stop me breaking a few of the Dead out if I had to, and now she’s not even here to object. I won’t set a whole tower free, but a few hundred ought to be enough to keep them busy. Then I just need to lurk and wait for the Fire Aspect to start casting - or if he stays in the camp; I’ll just sabotage the wards. I can steal the notes while I wait - they’ll be distracted with all the chaos.”

((Cog + Command to select the best amount to release and where to release them from. Unknown difficulty - failure could result in releasing too many or too few.))   
((Eeek. Okay then... 4+0+2 stunt+3 Prince of Hell+4 Adorjani ExD=13. 8 sux.))

Keris is a ghost, scouting out the locations, and she notices that the Lookshyians have put additional warding and rings of salt around the island towers closest to them. But then, ah, she finds a white stone tower jutting out of the lake that’s consumed much of the centre of the town, dammed by the inner city walls. There are many of them, the lower storeys underwater, but the others rising above. And they moan and groan and roar and snarl, because the Dead in these towers have been trapped in here for a very long time, and - if Keris remembers correctly - the Dead are paralysed when they are over running water. Which means that they can’t even move to attack each other.

But, Keris sees, this one is right on the edge of the lake and the water is barely lapping at it. And if she just collapses the tower in the right way, it’ll fall onto land. Unleashing the hundreds of Dead within.

((This is “a few hundred” rather than “thousands or more”, yes?))   
((Yes.))   
((Uuuurgh, Calesco is probably going to rake me over the coals for this.))

Checking herself one last time - her moonsilver armour disguised as stark white plate that brings to mind the colour of bone or pallid flesh and her essence warped into necrotic rot - she goes for it. The golden spear bites deep into white stone, destabilising the structure that stands tall but no longer proud above her.

Slash. Slash. Slash. Stone gives way and Keris retreats to a safe distance as this ancient tower block of Shogunate stone collapses in one direction, the supports crumpling from the damage she’s done to them. Stone buckles, throwing up a great cloud of mould and spores, and dust billows around her.

And from the wreckage of this cracked stone egg spill monstrosities. The hungry ghosts in here have been trapped for an awfully long time; immobile, sessile - and yet in some horrible way _aware_. This dead city is too close to the lands of the Dead, too trapped away for their po souls to return to the natural flows of essence in Creation. And their mortal remains have just been crushed by stone and mashed and pulped.

Legless screaming women spill out, dressed in tatters of their own flesh. The torsos of men sprout from the bodies of centipedes. Giant bloated infants tower over the others, while pallid long-limbed children whose heads are but faces gnash and gnaw at the air. There is not one trace of sanity in their voices; just screaming and weeping and roaring and raging and mad, hysterical, ceaseless laughter in a tidal wave of sound.

Keris squeezes her eyes shut and forces the horror down. She can’t, she _cannot_ let herself feel for the men and women of Lookshy who she’s set this horde of monstrosities on. They knew what they would face up here - they chose to come anyway. And they came to Taira itself to rob her homeland of its treasures and kill anyone who tried to stop them. They’ll kill her too, if they can. If she lets herself doubt, she’s doomed.

Biting her lip under the bone-porcelain mask of her armour’s disguise, Keris waits for the brunt of the mob to spill out - and follows them.

The churning tide of monsters seem confused. They’re not heading in any particular direction, and indeed some are attacking one another. The rain seems to be dulling their senses, perhaps because it’s moving, ‘living’ water. And there are very few humans close to them; nothing alive to stoke their ire. Even if they have supernatural senses, the Lookshyians are hidden behind salt and blessed wards.

Keris, on the other hand, is very much alive. Rolling her eyes, she flits between the monsters and the camp; a tiny figure in bone-white armour against the hoard, and bites her lip with shark-sharp fangs as she raises her faceplate and turns.

The scent of living blood; delicate and fresh, wafts out through the rain-soaked air.

First a pack of children, long-limbed, sharp-fanged, eyes glowing blue-green catch sight of her. They scream, scampering after her with their too-long nails clicking against the ground. Then come the bumbling bloated infants, both of them following the child-monsters who are perhaps their elder siblings. Then the centipede men, the snake-screaming women, the things more like wolves and the things more like bats flapping through the night.

They’re coming for Keris.

Her eyes flare green, assessing them, and... if they weren’t so weak, it would be pretty damn intimidating. Even as is, it makes her heartbeat jump a few notches as she executes a pinpoint turn and leads them straight towards the Lookshyian camp. The horde is terrifying, but so weak. Nearly without exception, they’re as powerful as a newborn ghost of a mortal, their long paralysis confining them for centuries. A few are stronger, but in truth, while they are twisted and deviant from age, their deformity has not swolen their power.

((Almost all of them are Enlightenment 1. That doesn’t mean they’re not strong or tough, but they’re metaphysically weak and starving.))

She lets a few droplets of blood linger on the ground to draw them onwards as she outpaces them towards the camp, and readies herself for a quick test of skill and stealth. Behind their wards, the Lookshyians are fairly safe - but if Keris can sabotage just a few of the lines before being seen, they’ll find themselves very busy indeed.

The Lookshyians have a wall up, conjured sorcerously from the earth itself. It’s the same magic that they used to build their fortification in the town outside the fog. If Keris’ estimations are correct, most of their wards against the Dead are built into that wall - salt embedded into the stone, and ritual magics worked and engraved into it.

((... can ESM disguise Keris’s charm use? Specifically, can it disguise WWI as not obviously Malfean?))   
((No. It can go as far as to hide your anima banner, but I’d argue that both it and Perfect Mirror can’t hide bits of your Charms with a defined theme. And ESM is “Malfean fire consumes the thing you hit”.))   
((Yeah, just checking. Hmm. Okay. Damn, if I’d remembered it was actually a physical wall and not a cleared area of salt lines and streams, I’d have brought that firedust. Gimme a mo to think.))   
((Hmm. So this is a Stone Wall with 12L soak and 80 health levels? That would mean Keris rolling 17 dice against 0 DV, then threshold successes+14L-12> automatic health levels done to the wall. Which is seven or eight attacks. So she could conceivably cut a hole in the thing with a few flurries.))   
((Yes. Or she could decide to risk the WWI. Or she could go for the gate, which is a vulnerable place. Or she could sweep along the walls and kill the guards silently to give her more time to work stealthily. Or she could use sorcery to snuff the thaum wards out, leaving only the salt as a defence to work around. There are options here.))   
((She could also really regret not having a siege sorcery spell.))   
((She is definitely doing that one. Hmm. Okay. Can she hear what the level of activity in the camp is like?))   
((It’s officially daytime, but the weather is miserable and it’s raining hard and it’s a thunderstorm, so only the people who really have to be are outside.))   
((Perfect.))

She’s silent as a ghost - actually, she’s a lot more silent than the mob of ghosts on the approach - as she sweeps her trail of blood drops up to the main gate and then darts up the wall. In this miserable weather, nobody is outside who doesn’t have to be, and the noise of the thunderstorm will drown out the wailing until they’re close. If she can kill the guards quickly and quietly and then cut open the gate; the Dead will be inside before anyone can react.

The Lookshyians are not like other soldiers Keris has encountered. In place of tired men wishing to be inside, half blind in the gloom, they wear strange helmets with blue jade lenses that let them see movements of the air and avoid flash-blindness from the thunder. Their armour is well-made, even wrapped in oilcloth so water doesn’t get in the joints. It’s even heated, so they can stand up on lonely walkways without ruining their eyesight huddling around a fire.

Keris kills every last man and woman on the wall. She’s an invisible creature blending into the stonework; a monster who lets off barely any heat through her armour; a killer whose hair fans out so she doesn’t even have a human profile when flashes of lightning illuminate the area. A spear through the spine; a decapitating strike that lops their head off; simply inhumanly strong arms around the neck, breaking their spines in a simple wrench.

They’re all dead, by her hand.

She circles down to the gate - the inside of the gate, because the Dead are getting closer and she has no intention of being caught outside it when they arrive. Whirling around, she brings the spear down in a criss-crossing series of slashes at the hinges and pivots as she slams full-force into the thing.

Keris lets her caste mark flare to life as she works. The first series of slashes damage the gate, but it doesn’t fall, and she hits it with a dull thud and runs a few paces up it before somersaulting backwards and twisting into another ringing series of jabs and cuts. Her caste mark flares to life on her forehead as she works; the lies of the Dragon rendering it a sucking jet-black circle that drips a thin stream of blood down her porcelain faceplate.

No sign of any alertness, no warnings. But the gate is making as metal warps and is crushed and it’s Keris’ desperate hope that she can get it done on time.

There are two remaining hinges and one pivot hanging on, and she attacks them with desperate, savage brutality, adding spin-kicks to her repertoire that slam into the shaft of her spear just below the head and add more power to each blow. The Dead are getting closer - she can already hear them, and it won’t be long before the Lookshyians do as well. The gate needs to go down. Now.

The hinges give way with a shatter. The Dead can smell her - and far more pressingly, they can smell the blood on her weapons and the dead Lookshyians up on the walls. They hunger. They thirst.

Keris only has a minute or two before they get there, and while the gate is destroyed the salt in the walls and the wards laid upon them remain.

((Will they be able to get through the gate if there’s salt in the wall above it?))  
((Or is the gate full-height?))  
((Nope. Can’t cross lines of salt.))  
((Crap. Hmm. How hard would it be for her to shatter the wall above the now-smashed gate?))  
((Much easier - it’s like this style, with a thin covered walkway atop the gate.))  
((Excellent.))

She spares a split-second’s thought for shattering the wards with Sorcery... but no. First she needs to open up the camp for the Dead. Sprinting up the walls, Keris brings her spear around on the walkway atop the now-flattened gate; tenser and more pressed for time than ever.

A shrill howl from the Dead outside leaves Keris wincing. Out in the compound ahead, Keris sees a door open, shedding light out. A woman pokes her head out.

... and sees the gate smashed and broken, and the spectral monstrous forms of the howling Dead just outside. She screams out a warning immediately, and the storm treacherously doesn’t blot it out with noise.

Leaping up, Keris brings down her two-headed Solar spear in a frankly showy flip, and cleaves straight through the walkway, smashing it apart. Salt leaks out of the broken platform, and a few more blows are enough to collapse it entirely.

In the rain, the salt simply... dissolves. It’s gone. And salt water doesn’t stop the Dead.

Gates are always the weak point of a fortress, and that’s why they’d had three guards there. They’re all dead now. And the gate is broken.

The first of the Dead to reach the gates are mostly interested in the dead guards that fell down when Keris broke the platform. They’re the long-limbed children, and like spiders or mantises they pounce on the corpses, too-wide mouths ravening as they tear them apart. But there’s not enough flesh and blood for the others, coming up from behind.

Steeling her heart, Keris backs off - further down the walls, away from the developing melee - and readies her next trick. While not her beloved Lance, this orichalcum spear of a fallen age is close enough to suffice, and she calls on sorcerous power to imbue it as she focuses on the wards of the the fortress.

((Backing off and taking a Shape Sorcery action to shatter the wards, hopefully before anyone can muster enough discipline to stop her.))   
((Backing off to where?))   
((Along the wall - that is, up onto the top of the wall, and then down the circumference away from the gate.))   
((Okay, take your Shape Sorcery action. Roll me Physique + Subterfuge, though.))   
((HPC still active to allow her to stealth as though she had cover. 5+5+2 stunt=12. 5 sux.))   
((What does her Abyssal-anima look like colour-wise?))   
((A sucking black void with a halo of blood spelling out Underworld glyphs of darkness, death and despair. So, uh. Basically a goth-ised version of her normal one. : P))   
((ha ha ha, lol, they got 5 successes on 9 dice for them.))

Keris begins to gather magic around her. Her anima wraps her. Calesco’s lies saturate her, so what should be healthy red is instead a eye-hurting black that somehow draws more attention than the mere absence of light.

And that’s probably what does it.

“Anathema!” someone screams, and there’s a snap of two crossbows.

((Okay, so they’re at normal range, but there’s a -3 external penalty from the torrential rainstorm. However, Keris is doing a Shape Sorcery action and thus is Inactive and cannot defend or use any Charms.))   
((Both crossbows hit. What’s Keris’ current soak?))   
((Craaap. Uh, she has her armour on, so...   
Soak: 7B/7L natural + 15B/15L armour = 22B/22L.   
Hardness: 10B/10L.))   
((Okay, amusingly enough, because of the rain penalty they didn’t actually do enough damage to get past her Hardness. As per the rules, you need a Reaction + Occult test to stay focussed on your Sorcery. It’s Diff 1 by default but the loud noise of arrow against your armour with Keris’ sensitive hearing increases it to Diff 2. Remember, no Charms allowed.))

One bolt glances off her chest, skittering away to hit the stone beneath her, while the other one pings off her helmet, shattering as it does and making the metal ring like a bell. It doesn’t hurt, but it is super distracting when Keris is doing something very high concentration with shaped essence.

She grits her teeth and focuses on Dulmea’s music and the strands of essence she’s holding, willing it not to blow up in her face. As soon as she’s done, though, she is going to find those two crossbowmen and... ooo, do something horrible to them.

Though maybe she’s sort of about to do that now. Her spell is shaped, and she releases it in a cloud of cloying blackness.

All along the walls, characters in elemental fire and earth and wood flare to life - and are snuffed out by the blackness, leaving only charred marks where they once stood.

The wards are down. And the Dead spill in, overrunning and trampling the long-limbed children as they do so.

Rubbing her head and grumbling, Keris moves further away from the gate, ducking low to break the sightline the Lookshyians have on her and watching for the Dragonblooded. She drops down off the wall and starts in towards the pile of treasure that she’d found the sorcerers working on. If the notes are anywhere, they’re likely to be there.

She’s almost there when her sensitive, storm-hurting, ghost-screaming-hurting ears pick up the characteristic, unmistakable crackle of fire essence being shaped by a sorcerer. It’s back the other way, back by the building the crossbowmen shot from, and if they’re shaping sorcery now she won’t reach it unless she pushes herself - possibly revealing more of her nature than she would like. However, the sorcerer is vulnerable here - and if he gets a spell off, the Dead are all tied up in the chokepoint. He could kill them all.

“Vali!” Keris shouts internally, and her son responds. In fact, he almost over-responds. Keris is used to calling on him in the water - on land, the explosion of dark anti-light around her nearly sends her head over heel at how far each stride is taking her. She can feel the power of the dark stormclouds of the Spires pushing her onward; filling each footstep with black-fringed lightning.

She’s no ghost anymore. She’s a howling missile, trailing a curtain of void behind her and pointed straight at the Fire-Aspect sorcerer.

The Lookshyians have no time to try and stop her. They barely have time to _see_ her as she rockets across the courtyard. She’s on them before they can begin to respond, the lethal double-bladed spear coming around in a whirling combination-blow. The leading edge crashes into the sorcerer’s neck at a hundred and twenty miles an hour; the combination of force, angle and sharpness going clean through his armour and raking a deep and most likely fatal gash across his collarbones. It’s just about possible that he could survive it, if he were to staunch the bleeding and crawl somewhere safe.

But the point is made moot by the other end of the spear, which whirls round with barely any momentum lost.

This one cuts upward through the gash and decapitates him completely.

Keris continues the spin to flip her spear into one hand and grabs his head out of the air with the other. A leap takes her onto the shoulders of a centipede-yidak, and she speeds away as the fiery essence destabilises and detonates; outpacing the shockwave with sheer velocity.

One of three down. An experienced, heroic dragonblooded Exalt, dead because he relied on mortal men to defend himself from a creature like Keris. Zoom and boom, dead.

His head is still gasping, his eyes still momentarily aware as it stares at its killer. His lips still move. And then his expression goes vacant, with the final solemnity of death.

Keris circles; her overtaxed ears working for signs of the other sorcerer. Karal; her name was - the Air-aspected woman who was in charge here. Keris’s second target. She won’t make the mistake of prioritising the research again unless it looks like the Dead are about to overrun its building.

Keris hears the slithering, crackling noise of wood essence flaring to life, even as she sees green light ignite within the building. It isn’t Malfean green, though; it’s soft and gentle, like the green of sunlight shining through summer leaves.

Then that green starts punching out from the building into the oncoming horde. It’s joined by the hard, heavy, crystalline noise of earth essence, and the barrage is joined by rocks flying out. The feeling of weakness is familiar.

But where’s the air aspect she’s here to kill? Amongst the cries of “anathema!” and “he’s dead!”, where’s the anathema’s second target?

((Keris recognises that both the Wood Aspect and the Earth Aspect, and they’re in that main building the Lookshyians seem to be using as their redoubt. She can’t find the Air Aspect with her IEI sensory stuff of the fight, though.))

Keeping an ear on the fight - she’ll have to intervene if the tide starts turning heavily against the Dead - she forays closer to the sorcerer’s building and pricks her ears to try and locate the woman inside. The Dead are inside the compound now - no longer so bottlenecked as to be taken out in one fell swoop. She can probably afford to leave them to it - with the added bonus of not having to watch what she can hear happening.

Yes, she can hear the screams. She’s already heard the gurgling of a woman who had her throat torn out by the Dead, and the shrieks of a man as he’s torn apart and eaten before he’s even dead. The wails and the thunderous booms and the sound of the rain make Keris feel like she’s thinking through mud. But she does manage to hear the woman’s voice, away from the main noise - she sounds scared as she asks “What’s going on? Is that fighting out there?”

She’s in one of the temporary warehouses they set up - not the main research location, but one of the auxiliary places. Maybe she was cataloguing some newly found things.

Like a shark seeking blood in the water, Keris homes in on the sound. The Fire Aspect’s head goes to her hip, held there by a lock of hair looped around her waist like a belt. Like some kind of monstrous spider, Keris scuttles in through the door when no one is watching and up into the rafters. Down below, two Lookshyian guards are arguing while the Dragonblooded Keris saw earlier tries to change into a very fancy suit of red jade armour that’s clearly of Shogunate manufacture. It looks sleek and predatory, and there’s clearly some kind of essence weapon mounted on its arm. It’s probably loot they found. She’s half in and out of it.

The guards are arguing about whether they should be letting her do it. The man argues that they should just be dragging her to the compound, while the woman hold that a suit of dragon armour could be vital - and from her tone, she is of the opinion that that’s the only way to make this Fara woman useful.

Keris sizes the woman up. Orange Blossom wanted a hostage, and the head of the sorcerer-engineering corps would make an excellent one - _if_ Keris can guarantee getting her to Orange Blossom without issue. If not, it’ll be best to kill her here and now and take the notes and perhaps one of her mortal assistants.

She doesn’t move like a trained fighter. She doesn’t even put on armour like someone used to it. Keris has seen her type before. She reminds her of that Water Aspect from An Teng, the one who had been wonderful in bed but clearly wasn’t a soldier or a fighter - and much like him, Keris suspects this one is an academic first and foremost. And above that, Keris remembers the anomaly that her fire-aspected underling was massively more powerful and experienced than her. She’s some over-promoted bookworm, Keris thinks, who probably got this position due to coming from an important family.

((Keris doesn’t think she’s in great shape - probably Physique 2-3, and her weapon skills are basic, again 2-3 and that’s including her Style.))

Mind made up, Keris drops silent and monstrous from the rafters. The guards are dead before she hits the ground, and the bloodied orichalcum edge of her spear comes to rest at the woman’s throat.

“Stop right there,” Keris says - still in her Thornsian accent, just to keep up the look of the thing. There’s still a chance the woman might get away, after all. “Make one wrong move and you die like your underling.”

The shocked-looking head at her hip is still oozing the occasional drop of blood to drive her point home for her.

“Anathema!” she squeaks, half-way into the armour. She stiffens up, flailing, and...

((Roll Athletics, Diff 2, 5 dice. 1 success, fail.))

... falls over, in a great clatter of armour.

((Goddamnit, this was her chance to leap away because you held her at spearpoint rather than grappled her.))   
((And she fucked it up.))

Keris looks down at her and manages to suppress a laugh. A booted foot comes down on her midsection, holding her down, and the spearblade goes back to her throat.

“Perhaps you want to die?” the Anathema asks curiously. “I can help you with that, if you’re going to be difficult. Or you can get out of that armour and show me to where your sorcerous records are.” She reads the hope in the woman’s eyes and shakes her head. “There is nobody coming to help you. Your comrades are busy with the Dead. You can take me to your workspace and live, or you can die and I will find it anyway.”

“Child!” Dulmea snaps. “Why are you being so stupid!? If you wish to take a prisoner, she must be unconscious or she will try to escape given the first chance she has! Knock her out and sever her hands, then search for it yourself.”

“No!” Calesco blurts out. “No, mama, don’t do that! Killing is one thing, but...”

“Silence!” Dulmea snaps. “Keris is being a fool leaving an Exalt mobile and able to flee or fight back. Either kill her now and complete the mission, or be comprehensive in eliminating a potential threat.”

Keris waits a second longer with no reply, then mutters an inner curse. “Fine,” she snaps, and brings the flat of the blade down on the woman’s head.

‘I’ll hamstring her and carry her out,’ she thinks inwardly. ‘It can be healed by a decent surgeon with magic - I can do it, in a pinch - but she won’t be getting away easily. And that’ll leave the rest of them trapped in here with the Dead. Even if they fend off the attack, they’ll take losses.’

((Uh, so, Bashing attack to knock her past Incap without actually killing her, I guess.))   
((You have her effectively grappled. That’s easy - that, or you can just have her hold a beloved item of Keris’ that is covered with the sorcerous Spiteful Sea Tincture with the non-lethal repurchase so she’s constantly being kept full of bashing by constant doses of SST.))   
((Oh, and either way, deliberately Crippling an unconscious person, especially to the level that Exalted healing can’t heal which is effectively amputation, requires suppressing Compassion.))

“No!” Calesco shrieks. “You can’t! _Mother!_ Don’t you dare!”

((Rolling Compassion - 1 sux. Rolling Dulmea-mama “Caution” Principle which is probably at 5 given how it’s linked to survival and often overrides the others; 2 sux.))

‘I’m sorry, Calesco,’ Keris thinks as the flat of the orichalcum spearblade smacks into the woman’s head with a sickening crack. Her stomach twists horribly as she makes the cuts - deep enough to slice muscle and nerves in a way that won’t heal - and binds them so she won’t bleed out.

She can hear her daughter take off from the Tower within her - through a window, given the crash of shattering ice-glass. It sounds like she’s crying.

But Keris can hate herself later. For now, she slings the woman across her shoulders and makes for the sorcery workshop. Her mission here is essentially done - both sorcerers are dead, and the Lookshyians up here are taking heavy losses. They can’t hold the valley and the town below with only one sorcerer, so she may not even need to murder the last one. She can steal all the information worth having and take Karal Fara off to Orange Blossom for interrogation.

Maybe the Fiend will even offer healing in exchange for what she knows.

The armour is even heavier than her superheavy plate, though that might not mean it’s better. It’s certainly less elegant, though, even with that strange essence weapon attached to the right arm. Keris pulls it off the previous wear and feels it come into her possession by right of conquest as she coos over it. Then she’s stuffing it away in her soul, and dashing into place where the sorcerers were working.

There are people in there, hastily trying to ready up an experimental weapon, protected by a few guards who are at the door. Presumably the people there are most of the other people from the sorcerer-engineering school. Keris drops their leader and lunges; her spear coming out in a whirl of blood and orichalcum. She feels... almost numb to the killing, at this point. Normally she doesn’t mind killing in battle, but she’s at the point of just wanting this horrible mission to be over.

((Physique + Melee to butcher them all. Like _animals_. Diff 5.))   
(( : ( ))   
((5+5+3 Friagem Serpent+2 stunt=15. 5 sux. Uh... is that a success? I always forget whether Diff means you need to get at least that many or more.))   
((This isn’t being resolved as a DV, so you just need to hit that number. And man, you’ve been rolling _shit_ this session. What’s up?))   
((The dice fairies are taking revenge for my sins in unleashing a Junji Ito panel on a bunch of mortals and then sabotaging all of their defences.))   
((wicked, wicked dice fairies))   
((so mean))

A few heartbeats later, and they’re all dead. Every last one. Her orichalcum direlance is dripping with blood. Her white robes are stained in blood. The walls are soaked with blood. Her hair is coated in blood.

The last one nearly got lucky, with a desperate, despairing lunge with his dagger. Keris’ sixth sense barely saw it coming, and she leaned out of the way. Then she cut him into four.

That was fun, Eko gestures bouncily within her head. But it would have been way easier if Mama had tried properly. What’s up, she indicates with a twirl.

Keris grunts and pokes at the device the doomed sorcerer-engineers had been trying to set up. Normally, she’d be fascinated. Right now, she feels mostly guilty.

She pauses, eyes widening. Oh. Uh... whatever this is, something which involves so many essence-trapping crystals together and what looks like some kind of accumulator designed to pull it in, filtered through gold-rimmed lenses... well that can’t be good. It just can’t. It’s either a bomb to blow up this place if they’re caught here, or they’re desperately trying to activate some experimental anti-Dead weapon that uses trapped... yes, the whole thing does reek of sun-essence.

((Shit. Can she disarm it? Is it armed?))   
((... can she steal the sun-crystals?))   
((It does not appear to be functional yet. If Keris guesses correctly, they might have been working on this to wipe out entire areas of the ghosts here - or maybe it’s a Shogunate jury-rigged thing to kill fae with sunlight they’re trying to repair. Stealing the crystals could potentially be like trying to defuse a bomb - a lot of essence-trapping crystals are very unstable and release their trapped light - or fire or water or wood or so on - if knocked.))

She opts to leave the device for the moment, focusing on the research instead. She’ll get that squared away, then take this thing apart. If she can steal the essence crystals, all the better.

... and honestly, a challenge that doesn’t involve doing horrible things to people is kind of welcome right now. The notes are strewn around the place. Many of them are rather blood-covered, but they’re there. She gathers them up and shoves them blindly through her hair, cocking an ear to the sounds of fighting. If the Dead are nearly on her - or nearly beaten back - she won’t have time to disarm this thing; it’ll be grab Karal and run.

It sounds like the Dead are starting to rout. There’s a lot of them, but the two Dragonblooded up there are enough to turn the tide. If they’d just been up against mortals they’d have slaughtered them all, but the constant barrage of anima-fuelled bolts of elemental energy and the way the energy of the dragonblooded seems to crackle with their men is stopping them routing. She can hear the blows of the mortals strike like landslides and that the Dead are being caught up on barricades of thorns and prickles that cut at their spirits.

Notes stowed away, Keris moves quickly to examine the contraption and work out how to remove the essence crystals; Karal gathered up in her hair and one ear trained on the Dragonblooded.

((Okay, so, trying to steal the essence crystals is easier than it would otherwise be, because you rolled so well to deduce its purpose. You just need to get them out. Because you’re trying to do it quickly, it’s a Physique + Occult roll, Diff 8, with each success netting you an Essence crystal))   
((Are there eight crystals total, or each threshold success?))   
((Eight successes will get you 1, and then +1 for each success above that.))

It... looks simple enough, she decides. She can see how the essence is meant to feed from the crystals into the accumulator, and it should be as simple as just... removing the crystals. Smoothly. And quickly. Without jarring them. At all.

So basically the sort of thing she did all the time as a kid.

Stabbing the spear into the ground and dragging Karal closer behind her with her hair, Keris cracks her knuckles, flexes her fingers and...

((5+5+3 Light-Fingered Larcenist+2 stunt+5 Metagaos ExD {MINE}=20. 12 sux. The dice fairies like me again! Because I’m aiming to disarm a bomb instead of maiming people!))

... one and two, three, four and... five. Five essence crystals plucked from the mechanism, almost vibrating with contained power. Yes, Keris thinks. These will be very useful.

Passing them back into her hair, she hoists Karal Fara higher up on her shoulders and makes tracks for the back of the fort. It’s time to not be here anymore.


	8. Chapter 8

Once again, it is raining in this lost, fog-wreathed city. Keris sits on top of a ruined building, rain drenching her hair and running down her face, and listens to the remaining sounds of violence in the Lookshyian base. The screams of the injured are piercing-sharp. The crackle of the Dragonblooded animas remind her of who won the day.

And then the shouting starts when they find their thaumaturgists and engineers are dead. Every last one.

Time to leave, she thinks, hauling the limp body of Karal Fara onto her back. With a stop up in the hills to - urgh, so heavy - retrieve her jade dragon.

... her jade dragon which may be the thing keeping the mists here, she remembers with an unsettling gut-lurch. It’s probably magical enough to anchor a working in, and from what Illana had said, these mists were basically part of a giant weather pattern stretching across all the nearby mountains. If Keris took it out...

Well, fuck it. She’d deal with that if it happened. The risk certainly wasn’t enough to pass up the carved Mela for herself. Skidding down the side of the building, Keris sets off at a quick sprint towards Kerisa’s farmhouse, where the dragon was stashed.

The farmhouse is still there. So, fortunately for the sake of every living and Dead being still in this place, is Keris’ dragon. It’s safely tucked away inside, and it wasn’t like she left any footprints that the Lookshyians could have used to follow her here.

She cocks her head to it, listening carefully. Last time she’d been in something of a rush, but now she has time to study it and the - oh, _gorgeously_ intricate - webwork of essence that flows through the sinuous blue jade body.

Keris still isn’t sure exactly what it does, but it is surely a priceless relic of lost ages. The power in it is incredible - the only things Keris has seen which are similar are the masterpieces of the Unquestionable - and of course the Memory of Baisha.

More notably, however, it seems to be part of a greater web of power stretching around this city. If Keris had to guess, whatever went wrong may have been using this as a part of their great attempt to protect the city from the forces of Chaos. Removing it may damage the fog working, but she doesn’t think it’ll destroy it.

((A5 rating, unknown powers, part of some greater power network))  
((Holy shit.))

Despite the horror of the day, despite the weary disgust she feels for the brutality behind her and the bloodshed she has yet to carry out, Keris still lapses into a fit of faintly hysterical giggling at the understanding of exactly what she’s claimed. It’s a bit too high-pitched and gaspy to really count as _happy_ laughter, though, and she wrestles it under control before it degenerates into sobs or a full-blown fit of shocked mania.

Going crazy at this juncture will not help matters.

Now, if she slings Karal over her shoulders, sacrifices one hair-tendril to the task of holding her on and re-uses the still-mostly-intact sling she carried the dragon up here with in the first place, she can... hurt like hell when she gets it through the mists, probably. But she should be able to get it out without breaking it. And then she can hide it in the swamp somewhere until she has four hours or so free to steal it, which has the added bonus that if she creates a bit of Metagaos’s swamp to get it _into_ her domain, breaking the magic will leave nothing but swamp among more swamp, and won’t alert searchers to something Hellish in the area. Probably.

“Oi, mum!” It’s Vali. “I think the red armour you stole from this girl might help with that. It sounds strong-ifying.”

“Oh?” Keris considers, then shrugs. It’s not like the Lookshyians are going to be able to search the whole valley in the time it takes her to put a suit of armour on - even if it will be slow and annoying compared to her beautiful moonsilver set. She eyes her captive, making sure she’s definitely unconscious, and shrugs. “Alright, pass it out.”

The red jade armour gets pushed out of Keris with a heavy clash of metal and splat as it lands in the mud behind her. It’s right at the limit of what she could fit in this way, and she can tell - the shoulders get stuck in the opening several times, and her hair gets caught in the knee joints.

“It’s so awesome, mum,” Vali says happily. “The helmet is shaped like a dragon’s face. That’s only the best helmet ever.”

“What about a helmet made for you when you _are_ a dragon, though?” Keris asks with a quirked grin, stepping out of her moonsilver plate as it unfolds like a flower.

“Well that’d obviously be shaped like a dragon’s head,” Vali says, sounding hurt. “Okay, okay! So this is proper armour and all thick. I bet if you spent more time wearing it, you could learn to grow your skin around it so it’d be even better. I was still trying to work out how to put it on, before you asked for it back. It’s kind of hard! Also, it’s a bit big for me!”

It does seem much more complicated than Keris’s normal armour. There’s harness hanging inside it, and there’s all these bits secured over the top of the harness and the armour itself has complicated bits which lock together to seal the joins and stop someone sticking a knife through them. There’s also a pulsing sound of an essence crystal of some kind - a hearthstone, Keris thinks, fire-aspected - in the back.

((Cog + Occult, Diff 4, to work out how to even put it on, 15 minutes of examination required for that - which is also the attuning period - then 5 minutes to put it on))

Keris toes a few of the pieces over and hauls up the harness with her hair, grabbing a few other bits and lining them up assessingly. That bit must go there, this other bit _here_... and she’s not too sure about the rest of it, but hells if she’s going to let this armour get away with being stubborn and... and not-put-on-able. It’s _hers_ now, dammit!

It takes quite a bit of effort to figure things out, and even longer to actually dress up properly. It’s nothing like her normal armour, where it’s basically just a matter of peeling open the back and then stepping in, then resealing behind her.

Heavy boots and legs, that she has to adjust down to be short enough for her. She steps into them. An even heavier breastplate that feels like it’s made of lead, crushing her shoulders. Arms to slide on and use her hair to latch it onto the breastplate. Heavy, clunking gloves which go onto the end of the arms and give her no manual dexterity when she’s wearing it. A helmet she has to use her hair to pick up and put on, because she can’t bend enough to stoop and don it.

She looks out at the world through red jade lenses, which turn the gloom into full daylight and highlight every source of heat in the dead city. And she wants to collapse.

This is armour. Proper armour. The heaviest armour she’s ever worn. Just taking a step in it is nearly as bad as carrying the entire jade dragon.

The armour says something to her in something which sounds like High Realm, characters she can’t read flashing up on the view of the red jade lenses. Words scroll from left to right.

And suddenly the weight is gone. The crushing weight is no longer there. She can bend. She can move her fingers around. She can even do a cartwheel, because she does - even if it’s heavy enough that it cracks the old road she was leaning on.

“So. Cool,” Vali breathes. “Wow. No wonder that boss-lady Asarin thinks Shogunate stuff is cool and collects it. I want more of it! This is so great! It’s even cooler than your normal armour ‘cause your normal armour is all small and curvy while this is huge and smashy!”

((When inactive, the armour has Mobility -5, Fatigue -5. However, you do have the required fire hearthstone for basic operations, and that means that the Mobility decreases to -2 and the Fatigue to -1. There are more advanced features that Keris doesn’t know how to use because she doesn’t know the ancient authorisation glyphs, but with the basic activation it adds +5 to your Physique + Athletics pool for lifting heavy things.))  
((Sweeeeeeet~))

Grinning wildly beneath the snarling dragon-mask, Keris lifts Karal onto her shoulder and gathers up the ropes of the improvised sling. It lifts... well, still not _easily_. But she can lift it without resorting to burning her soul.

Wow. She... she kind of agrees with Vali here. This armour is amazing. Asarin has good taste.

... and speaking of Asarin... Keris glances back down into the valley. If she’s running she won’t leave tracks, and there was a bunch of other stuff in that art galley. She only took the Carved Mela, but it probably couldn’t hurt to pilfer the rest - or at least the rest of the things that she can easily fit into her Domain, as a present. They may not make much sense as “art” to her, but her friend will probably appreciate them.

Urgh, it’ll slow her down. But it’s probably worth it, as long as there aren’t Lookshyians near the gallery. And she can take Karal and make sure she doesn’t wake up.

“I’m only helping with this so you can satiate your unstoppable greed and we can leave this wet, miserable place with your actually valuable hostage,” Dulmea says grouchily a few minutes later, as Keris picks through the ruined building. “But I believe that the gallery which says ‘things from around Creation’ is that way.”

By the end of her plundering, Keris has picked up quite a few things that caught her interest. Sadly, the paintings here are ruined, rotten tatters on the walls that the mould has eaten. However, she does find one intact one under a glass casing that avoided being broken, a painting of a pack of foxes in a city, rummaging in the bins.

Of course, she found the jewellery exhibit, and ran rampant there. Handfuls of personal gems and jewelry are scooped up. There’s very little jade there, but there’s obsidian earrings from the Far West lying among the powdery mould-encrusted remnants of seashells and there’s delicate, filigree silverwork with hair-thin meshes of silver and diamonds.

Finally, on the way out, she finds what must have been the remains of a fashion exhibit. All the clothes are rotten and gone, but lying in a locked cabinet, she finds something maybe more valuable - a manual of crumbly, wet paper which is barely legible, filled with sticky pictures of what the exhibit had been showing - and beyond that, she thinks the archaic Riverspeak is talking about how the examples are made. It’s heavily damaged, though, and repairing the manual or guidebook will take time and a lot of care.

“I will have you know,” she says haughtily as she darts back up the mountainside, “a fair amount of this I’m going to give to Asarin. Well, some of it. A bunch of the stuff like the four red squares that barely counts as art, for sure. She likes Shogunate stuff - and that means I’m building relationships with a citizen!”

Hauling the dragon up with a grunt, she glares at the hanging wisps of mist. “Okay, Vali? Just like last time. Help me break free of this place and then we never have to see it again; good riddance.”

“Awww. But what if there’s more cool Shogunate stuff?” he whines. “Bet Hanny would agree with me if she was here.”

It’s night by the time Keris gets out. It’s good to be breathing... wait, no, she’s not breathing fresh air. The air tastes exactly the same, which is to say, of slightly mouldy helmet. But she lays down her burdens with a sigh of relief.

Something about the fresher air seems to be making her living burden stir, though. She looks like she’s coming to. Frowning, Keris encircles her neck and squeezes. She can’t go too hard or for too long - she doesn’t want the woman dead - but things will be a lot easier if she’s unconscious. She locks her hair around the Dragonblood’s throat, choking her until she’s out of it. Doing this to a human would be a bad idea and cause long term damage. Keris knows that. She knew people who’d gone stupid after getting strangled, back on the streets. But the Exalted are made of tougher stuff.

Calesco’s comments are cutting, but Keris is ignoring her right now.

“What now?” Dulmea asks calmly. “It might be an idea to gag her, too. It might stop her spitting elemental force, if she can - and certainly stop her calling for help? But in the long term, what next?”

“Firisutu,” Keris says, rooting through materials she can use as a gag. Something the Air-Aspect won’t be able to just bite through or spit lightning at - wire, perhaps. The weight of the golden monkey in her hair is almost unfelt through the armour. “Take this message to Orange Blossom’s contact: It’s me. I’ve raided the Eshtock camp; the Fire-Aspect and sorcerer-engineers are dead and I have Karal Fara captive. She’s unconscious and hamstrung for now, but the sooner she’s in a secure place for questioning, the better. Come to the mouth of the valley by agata - as fast as possible, I mean it. I want her out of my hands as soon as possible so that I can hit the fort; I’m not leaving her unguarded before then.”

Firisutu nods, waiting while Keris imbues him with power, and then he grows two golden wings and vanishes off into the distance.

The message takes an hour to come back. “You never take the easy route to do anything, do you Keris?” Orange Blossom’s indigo tiger messenger - so like her anima banner - says harshly. She sounds rushed. “When I told you that I’d like one alive, I was talking about one of the mortal thaumaturges. Someone I could contain easily. Do you have drugs? If so, keep her drugged. I do _not_ have an agata. I can’t come collect her that way. But if you take her to Rouza, to the camp of the Emerald Hawks, I’ll send a message ahead to say that you’re coming. The Hawks are a mercenary band who work for me and they’re lead by outcastes. They’ll be able to contain her. Rouza should be on the map I gave you - it’s south of where you are, just on the edge of the mash. Maybe twenty miles away.”

Drugs, she says. Well, Keris put a decent effort into making her “Thorns” cover airtight. A little Kimbery poison won’t spoil it too much. One of her special slingshots of Malfean lead drops into her hand, and with a kiss she imbues it with a toxin of the Great Mother - painless and non-lethal, but numbing and deeply soporific. Popping it into Karal’s mouth, she reapplies the gag and lies her down on her front so she can’t choke on the thing.

That should keep her asleep.

She spends a while hiding the jade dragon; dragging foliage over it to break up its outline and - with tears of regret - plastering mud over the brilliant sky-blue scales. She’ll give it a thorough polishing when she retrieves it and puts it within herself, but her first priority needs to be offloading this woman. Twenty miles isn’t far - she can be there and back in an hour, bring the dragon within herself while she still has the cover of night to hide her, and then hit the fort.

In the corner of her eye, Keris thinks one of the bars on the side of her red-jade enhanced vision is getting lower. She’s not sure what the words under it means, though.

Looking over the marsh, it looks like it’ll be an easy run - as long as she doesn’t stop moving. If she stops moving, she’ll probably sink to the bottom in this armour. It feels lighter when she’s wearing it, but it’s still as heavy as it felt when she was putting it on.

She hesitates before starting off, considering her approach. Not only does she not really want to sink, but the thought occurs that showing up as she is, in full dragon armour... yeah, Orange Blossom probably won’t have told her goons to expect that. Also, honestly, Keris would rather not let Orange Blossom know she’s stolen this set of armour. A change back to her moonsilver set might be best before setting off.

Which of course takes another several minutes of swearing, wriggling out of heavy jadesteel slabs, getting her hair stuck and cursing some more. Her moonsilver, at least, opens up in a welcoming embrace for her as soon as she steps back into it - and is light and quick and agile. Ahhh. Perfect. The dragon armour might have _power_ \- and Vali is certainly enthusiastic in using what Keris figured out about how to put it on - but she’s always preferred speed to strength. Then she’s off, a bruised, battered and crippled Dragonblood slung across her back.

She has Dulmea confer with Orange Blossom’s map on several occasions, half-wishing that it was daytime so she could see the Imperial Mountain - which would at least give her a rough heading of “northwestish” to go from. As is, the map isn’t too helpful, because there aren’t many landmarks in a swamp, but Keris doesn’t make the mistake of stopping to look for some. That’s the best and easiest way to get turned around; she knows from bitter experience. She can at least judge _time_ , so if she goes more than twenty miles without finding the place, she’ll just start expanding outward in circles.

Happily, it’s not necessary - although she does _nearly_ miss the place, she spots the campfires about half a mile out of her way by chance, and homes in on them through the rain and soggy marshland. The Emerald Hawks are camped out in the ruins of a village, up on a rise of land where the land is drier. It’s still raining, though.

Crouching down low, Keris gets the chance to take a proper look at them - if only to verify that they’re the right group. They’ve got a green hawk emblem on the banner at the centre of the camp, so that’s probably them. She eyes that hawk, eyes narrowing. Maybe it’s just that anything green nowadays makes her think of Haneyl, but she can’t help but be reminded of an emberhawk from the Swamp. Her eye wanders across the group and the ruined village around them, roaming without really looking for anything specific.

It’s not the hawk that means anything. She doesn’t think so, anyway. The green might mean Malfean green, but Orange Blossom doesn’t really do things Malfeas-style. She’s not Testolagh.

No, what draws her attention is the few mercenaries who are on watch duty. Something about their posture, their physique, their build... they’re familiar. The aesthetics of Kimbery match certain of their proportions.

“Looks like Orange Blossom is sensible and likes art,” Zanara observes, his voice boyish and piping. “She’s made these people into art so they’re better soldiers. Or maybe it’s not her. After all, she’s got people working for her who might be artists. Maybe we can talk to them and see what they prefer to do.”

Keris hums in recognition, and rolls languidly to her feet; a faceless silver shadow in the gloom with a limp body hoisted over one shoulder. She approaches the camp more slowly than she’s capable of, letting them catch sight of her a little way out rather than appearing in their midst.

“The Emerald Hawks?” she calls ahead. “You’re expecting me, or should be.”

Things proceed from there, because while soldiers are trained to be suspicious, a woman in form-fitting moonsilver armour with hair that’s longer than she is tall, carrying a maimed Terrestrial Exalt, is pretty believable.

“Don’t like this,” says the huge man who’s the leader of this bad. His name is Youzen Ramani, and he wears a patchwork of many-coloured jade pieced together from wars. At his hook, he’s got a brutal hook and chain. He reminds Keris of Dragonblooded mercenary leaders she saw in Nexus, and indeed his accent is a Scavenger Lands one. He himself is Earth-Aspected, she hears. “Need more money for a Dragonblood.”

“Yeah,” agrees his slight, almost feminine looking subordinate who didn’t introduce himself and sounds like fire to Keris. “This is asking for a lot. You know? I reckon this means we need extra.” He strokes his jade bow. “Plenty extra.”

Thoroughly fed up, Keris rolls her eyes behind her faceplate. “She’s unconscious, drugged, hamstrung and tied up. If you big, brave soldiers aren’t up to the task of sitting on her for a few days then by all means, I’ll find someone more capable of guarding her. Like a small child. Or a squirrel. You can explain to your lady that you felt an overpromoted bookworm who got here on her family connections and _fell over_ trying to get away from me was too much for you.”

She pauses, letting the scorn sink in. “Or you can make sure she doesn’t choke on the drug-stone in her mouth and tell your lady, when she arrives, that she’s welcome for the woman in charge of the occult wing of her unit. Much more useful than a flunky, and you can probably wrangle a bonus out of her because of it.”

“Hmmmph,” the big guy just grunts.

“Hey, what are you?” the little fire-aspected guy says. He jangles as he walks, and Keris realises that’s because he’s lost one leg below the knee and rigged up what looks like the leg of a combat automaton as a replacement. “Like, question. What are you? We seen some funny people working for the boss lady, but you, showing up all shiny like in silver armour carrying a Dragonblood no less... well, wheew-eeeh! That just about takes the cake!”

“I’m not dumb enough to give up the edge that let me take down a Dragonblood, is what I am,” says Keris. “I mean, besides taking her by surprise, obviously. I’m working for your boss lady - ask her the details if you think you need to know. And while we’re on that note, I have other work to do for her, so...”

She slides Karal off her shoulder and lowers her - somewhat gently - to the ground. “Your lady will probably bitch and moan about her being Dragonblooded instead of a mortal flunky when she gets here. Tell her she’s welcome for the woman with more of the knowledge she wants than anyone else in her unit, and to quit whining when I go above and beyond for her. And have a good night under cover; it’s miserable out there.”

((Oh, Keris. Apparently she gets bitchy when she’s weary and disgusted and doesn’t feel good about what she’s doing.))

“Hah! Tricksy one! We aren’t dumb enough to let a captive Lookshyian speak! Ha! We’d have to be awful stupid to do that, and we aren’t!”

“Nope.”

“Let her talk? Ha ha! No way!”

Keris vanishes off into the darkness while the little one is still running his mouth.

It’s another half-hour or so of running back to where she left the jade dragon. She wants it inside her soul as soon as possible, because she’s not willing to spend four hours retrieving it after kicking over the ant hive that the Lookshyian fort will be. Besides, it’s raining hard and the middle of the night, so not many people are going to want to investigate any weird omen weather - if they notice it at all over the sound of the storm and through the swaddling gloom. The statue is where she left it. Because she would get to murdering if it was not.

Zanara and Vali appear to have come to an agreement that an art piece made of blue jade that’s as fine as this and is also a dragon is possibly the best thing ever.

Grinning, Keris spits out a bloody gobbet of blood and meat that sinks into the ground near it, and crouches to mutter to the point it sunk in. Around her, the already-swampy ground begins to decompose further, and Keris can hear fleshy roots spreading through the soil. By the time she finishes describing how the ground here is part of her flesh, claimed by her and belonging to her in perpetuity, the vegetation around her is becoming twisted and tangled. She knows from experience that if she leaves it for a day or so, it’ll be near-impassable.

But she doesn’t need it for that long. She just needs it long enough to move her beautiful dragon statue - once she’s cleaned it up a bit, of course. Crooning sweet songs, she removes the worst of the mud, wipes the scales clean and praises it for being so beautiful.

Then, satisfied by its condition, she circles it slowly and begins to chant.

All around her, flowers are blooming. Near her, they bloom in white and green - Haneyl’s colours, and her heart twinges for a moment as she wonders how her second daughter is getting on. Away from her, purple flowers blossom - the swamp plants that flower trader who had been talking to Illana had been talking about, by the look of things. Even in the rain, there is a sweet smell from them.

It takes four hours. By the end of the first, it’s started to rain blood. Mists spring up before the second is past - heavy, thick, warm and cloying, and the third is marked by tremors in the earth and the muted sounds of the Swamp. At the end of the fourth hour, Keris gives a mighty shout - and with a tearing sound and a muffled boom, the jade dragon is gone.

She coughs, wincing. That took a fair amount out of her. But now all she has left to do is gather her anima, aim at the still-expanding hell-swamp, and...

“ _Break_ ,” she snarls in Old Realm. And the growing warmth is gone, as is the feeling in the air. All that remains are countless blossoming flowers and the overgrown marsh plants. Keris spares a moment to hack a fair number of them down and clear the area a bit, just to further muddy the waters and obscure this sight. Then - after a quiet groan for what’s coming - she turns her heels back towards Saha and makes for the town.

Saha sleeps, not knowing what agent of hell advances towards it. Keris is up over the wall, and then she’s back.

Kuha is asleep when Keris arrives, because it’s probably about four in the morning. She only has two hours or so until it gets light, although the rain will delay twilight hours somewhat.

“I’m not back for good,” Keris tells Rounen, who _is_ awake still, and seems to be working on a story. Kerisa is... not in evidence, which either means she’s back in her box with her bones or has gone out to look for her parents in the town. She’s smart enough to be back before sunrise either way, so Keris isn’t too worried. “Tell her I stopped by and I’m still alive, but that I’m taking on the fort now. Once I’m back from that; we go.”

Rounen looks chiding, insofar as someone with a bud filled with flame for a head can look chiding. “She’s been very worried about you,” he says. “As have I, mum. Did you get hurt at all?”

“Not at all,” Keris reassures him. “The worst that happened was that I bit my tongue on purpose and two people shot crossbow bolts at me - and both of them bounced off my armour. This run should be even easier, as long as the shozei doesn’t get involved. And if the Lookshyians up in Eshtock have organised enough to send an emergency message down, he’ll want to get them out of there and it’ll be super-easy.”

“Well, you need to tell me the story about what you did,” he said, already scribbling down notes.

“I promise I’ll tell you the whole thing once we’re done here, but right now I’m in a hurry. If I’m not back by then, get Kuha up with sunrise and make sure we’re all packed and ready to go.” She gives him a kiss on the forehead on her way back out of the window. “See you soon!”

And she’s away.

Approaching the burned out quarter where the Lookshyians have their base, Keris can hear no sounds of alarm or disturbances. The night sky paints everything in shades of purple, but that just means her ears are what picks out the visored night guards. They may well be wearing the same red jade lenses as her new armour has, so she’ll need to be very careful about how she approaches the break-in.

Damn, she thinks without much force, and melts into the surroundings with practiced ease. She doesn’t take her armour off, though. Instead, she renews her shadow-guise to paint it again in dull bone-white and black.

She’d like to think that she’ll be able to get in and kill the Wood Aspect without being seen, but she’s not hopeful. If she is; her cover needs to be ironclad.

With that precaution taken, she edges forward, listening to the heavy clank of the guards’ steps and using a burst of speed to make it to the bottom of the wall, where they can’t see. The same tactics that she got in with last time will serve her again here - she hopes.

Fortunately, one of the guards appears to have fallen asleep at his post. Keris is up over the wall, past him, and scaling the citadel in a blink of an eye. She dodges the demons - who can’t see so well in the night, and she’s up onto the roof. It’s easy enough to do the same little ritual for the door as she did last time, and she’s in their so-called citadel.

Keris makes a mental note that if she ever has to build a castle, she’ll design it on the idea that people like her will try to break it. At the very least, it’ll make things more interesting.

((lawl))

This time she’s both more, and less, confident. On the one hand, she’s not tentatively treading into unknown territory, prepared to flee at any moment - she’s here on a mission, and it’s not the end of the world if she’s seen.

On the other hand, this time she’s not just here to steal some papers, she’s also here to murder a sorcerer. Care will be needed. Also some investigation into exactly where her respective targets are. If she’s really, really lucky, they may even be in the same place.

Touching the dark ground, Keris adjusts her shadow-guise to mimic the armour of the Lookshyians here. It won’t be enough to fool any real scrutiny, but if anyone catches sight of her going the other way down a corridor, she at least won’t obviously and blatantly stand out. Then, ears pricked for anyone moving towards her, she goes a-hunting for her targets.

Fortunately, fate seems to be on her side. Sneaking through the long purple shadows of the gloomy hallways, she comes across what can only be the archives of the sorcerer-engineers. She recognises the soft voice of her target, because she sounds a lot like her twin sister who’s still in Eshtock. She’s talking to a yawning man. From what Keris can pick up from their Lookshyian accents and the large amount of High Realm-like words they blend into their speech, they’re complaining about having to work late again.

The Dragonblood - Nerigus Sashi Keris remembers, the one whose name might be a local variant of Sasi’s - especially seems to be annoyed at Karal Fara. Sashi might look sweet and round-based, but she sounds very bitter about how Karal Fara was picked as leader of the sorcerer-engineers here. She seems to be of the opinion that she couldn’t find her arse with both hands and a Shogunate memory crystal. And her notes are disorganised and aren’t filed properly.

((Is the man a DB? And where are they in the building - up near the roof still, or deeper into the fort?))  
((The man is not - he’s probably another person from the engineers, considering he’s also mutually bitching about the notes. And they’re deep down in the guts of the citadel, literally underground.))  
((Dang. Hard to get out if they raise the alarm. On the other hand, CCC. Hmm.))  
((Okay then; surprise attack, flaring caste mark, invoking anima power to enforce perfect silence on everything within 5 yards. If I’m really, really lucky, I can take her out like I did the Fire Aspect. I am probably not that lucky. But I might be able to kill her without alerting anyone all the same.))  
((What Enlightenment is she, btw? 4 like her sister?))  
((Yes. Wood aspected, E4. She’s a babby sorceress.))  
((D’awww. Hopefully she is a babby sorceress without a surprise-anticipator.))  
((Okay, yeah, so laying out the scene so you can stunt. The archives are laid out like a more formal version of the working area you found in their base in Eshtock. They’ve got lots of cabinets holding scrolls lining the walls densely, and they’ve got working desks all along one room. The two of them are over by the working desks, trying to get their reports properly handled and performing a more detailed analysis on some Shogunate things they think they misidentified in the Eshtock team))

Keris takes a moment to close her eyes and centre herself. Her last target - and all of the notes she needs. All she needs to do is kill this woman, grab or destroy the notes, and get out. If she can do it quietly that would be nice, if she has to do it loud... well, it’ll be a pain leaving, but it’ll support her ruse.

So.

Trying hard not to think about this woman’s sister, and waiting until the sound of her voice marks her as facing away from the door, Keris slinks into the room. She takes a moment to size up the battlefield, and lunges at her back with lethal speed. A black circle sucks in the light on her forehead, and an oppressive silence fills the room and stifles all sound within it.

Keris’s blade is utterly silent as it lunges towards the woman’s spine. But maybe it’s the movement of the air that alerts her, because she kicks backwards, toppling her chair over and lands flat on her back. The spear whistles over her head, splintering the table.

Rolling over, her agile feet hook her chair and kick it into the way of Keris’ incoming spear strike.

The spear is too fast, and punches right through the chair - though it is slowed. She screams silently as Keris’ blade descends down and pierces her side. Red blood spurts out of her abdomen - but Keris had been aiming for her heart, dammit. And she’s moving now, pushing up onto one hand as she brings her legs around in an unarmed sweep at Keris’ own legs.

Keris leaps over the leg sweep. The blow misses, hitting the leg of a table, and the wood explodes in sharply barbed thorns and vines which snarl it up. The twirl of the spear has left it out of position for another blow, but there’s a knife in Keris’s hand like magic and Sashi’s leg-sweep has left her overextended - easy prey for the steel blade flashing in.

She’s hurt, and her desperate attacked missed. But she’s still got feet, and she hooks onto the vines on the table she kicked, yanking it back as cover. Keris simply lets the table slide by, then slides in closer. And then she stabs her; again and again and again and again and again a hundred times, moving with unnatural flickering speed until Sashi’s entire torso is butchered meat.

As the body drops, she turns on the poor mortal who has just been unknowing witness to this battle of demigods. He hasn’t even turned around yet. He doesn’t know it’s happening - because this entire murder has only taken a few seconds and there wasn’t a single sound.

((... I think we can probably safely say he dies from hundreds of stab wounds))  
((Yes.))  
((Yes, I think we can.))

Two hair tendrils flash out, knives held at their end. In a blur of motion so quick that he probably doesn’t even see them, they open his throat, his arms and his chest in a dozen places; pushing him backwards as the blood sprays out of him. He falls to the floor with what would be a squelch if any noise existed here, and the pool of blood slowly expands around him.

In the space of a few seconds - without a sound, without a single shelf disturbed - two people have died here. Keris does her best to ignore them as she begins gathering up the scrolls and research materials from the shelves. She can topple them all in the middle of the room once they’re empty and torch them to disguise the loss somewhat - or at least make it unclear how much was taken. It’ll also handily distract everyone while she makes her way back out.

“Good. Well done,” Dulmea says warmly. “That was very clean.”

Eko silently celebrates the large amount of ribbons Keris made from their bodies, and expresses with a happy twirl the desire that mama will remember what she’s learned today about how to make things pretty.

“You’re not keeping her body?” Zanara asks, sounding disappointed. “You kept the head of that other Dragonblood. Maybe you can start a head collection. If you want her blood for _art_ , it’s probably better blood. She had a Lookshy name while the head person didn’t so he was probably recruited by them - and that’s probably why he wasn’t in charge of the mission.”

Keris purses her lips... and then sighs, and goes back to decapitate the corpse. If nothing else, it’ll look better for the cover.

Urgh. She’s starting to get well and truly _sick_ of “the cover”. Still, one more act and she can be done with the whole horrible affair, and start on what _really_ matters.

“M’sorry,” she mumbles silently to the corpse, as she sets the broken shelves alight.

Zanara claps happily. “Now write a message for them in the blood on the wall! It’s got to be all pretty and elegant and flowing and perfect!” they command. “Or maybe in the hall outside!”

Eko wisely agrees with Zanara, since blood is just nature’s red paint.

... honestly, that does sound pretty... well, not _funny_ , but _appropriate_. Keris gives it only a little thought before the perfect phrasing springs to mind.

“ESHTOCK IS A CITY OF THE DEAD,” she daubs on the wall in Old Realm lettering. “AND THE DEAD KEEP IT.”

((... okay, yeah, that’s a 3-dot stunt for your Passing Off Blame roll.))  
((Yessss. Cog+Subterfuge: 4+5+3 stunt+3 Mendaciloquent Maverick+1 bonus {forged evidence or other “proof”}+9 Kimbery ExD {keep secrets by any means necessary, elegant practicality, delayed or ongoing harm}=25, mwaa haa. 9 sux. Less than I was hoping, but still pretty damn good! That should muddy the waters nicely.))  
((Her sequence of events is, of course, “Thorns sent a deathknight in to murder the Lookshyians and their agent used a Sijanese disguise - but not a good enough one”.))

When Keris slips out of the citadel, the first signs of dawn are just creeping through the rain. The guard will be changing soon. They’ll probably discover the dead people and the fire in quick succession. She makes for the barracks. The remaining few thaumaturges will, hopefully, be bunked together. They’re not Dragonblooded; she can kill them in their sleep and then break for it over the wall. Then, bar the handoff to Orange Blossom, she’ll be done.

There are some traces of slightly less lax military discipline around the engineer’s barracks, but Keris really gets lucky when she notices that the different uniforms under cover in a shed attached to the back of the barracks, trying their best to dry in the rain.

She slips inside.

((Physique + Melee to murder a barracks of sleeping men and women, Diff 3. The incident in Eshtock and now this both count as a scene towards raising Keris’ Conviction.))  
((mou~ : ( ))  
((5+5+2 stunt=12. _Gah_ , only 3 sux. Barely made it.))

The men are laid out in rows, fast asleep and defenceless. Keris makes it quick and relatively painless; slitting throats and easing thin, sharp blades in behind the ear. It’s ugly, horrible work, and at this point she’s churning with hate - but she forces herself to do it anyway, because otherwise this will all have been for nothing.

Gods. Calesco is going to rip her apart for this. It’s not a conversation Keris is looking forward to. So distracted is she that one or two of the men _almost_ wake - and it’s with a fast-beating heart that Keris slips out of the barracks-turned-tomb.

She waits for the changing of the guard to leave and be seen. It’s just a glimpse; a sleepy-eyed guard just starting his dawn shift as he comes up the stairs to the top of the east wall, who sees a figure with a golden spear some way along it and calls out. The figure turns...

... and reveals bloodstained, bone-white armour and a terrible black circle on its brow. He stumbles back, flinching away for just long enough... and when he looks again, the figure is gone.

The last that was ever seen of that figure was the vanishing out into the dawn, vanishes out over the wall.

Then Keris drops the disguise, washes off the blood, takes off her armour and hands it to Zanara for cleaning, and then loops back around to the place where they’re staying.

((How is she feeling?))  
((Awful. Guilty. Morose. Tired - not so much physically (though a bit of that, after three scenes of strenuous effort), but weary of all the brutality she’s had to inflict on people. Wanting very much to get out of this town and up to her home village and onto a quest line where she gets to free a lot of slaves and maybe heal some people and hand out food and that sort of thing. : P))  
((Also doesn’t help that she’s spent, like, half her WP over the last two sessions.))

Keris collapses down into the - well, much better bed thanks to that little act of kindness - and snuggles up to Kuha. The other woman is dry and warm and smells like flowers.

However, before she can rest, Dulmea is there in her head. “There is no time to rest now, child,” she says. “We do not want to remain in this town any longer than we have to, in case they begin randomly executing any outsiders or any other acts a sensible lord does to hunt down an assassin.”

“Mmmf,” she grumbles. “Fine. Kuha. Oi. _Oi_. Kuha. Up. C’mon. We’re going.”

She doesn’t sneak out in the... uh, early morning, like a thief - no, she says goodbye to Aihani and talks about how her stopover here has been nice, but she’s secured transport again and needs to be moving on if she’s going to make it back home for the birth. Like a normal person would. Her temporary host doesn’t seem too unhappy about her leaving - it’ll mean her spare rooms are empty again - and so all in all, Keris’s departure is fairly understated. By the time the sun is fully risen, she, Kuha, Kerisa and her demon familiars will all be well out of the town and on their way to drop off Orange Blossom’s sorcerous texts - and from there, to go on to Baisha.

... and if Keris perhaps had a few sziromkeruby within her Domain copy as many of the notes as they could en-route... well. Nobody needs to know that, right? It’ll be her little secret, just in case she comes across something similar in the future.

She stops by Illana’s caravan on her way out as well, with a note. The Lunar deserves a warning.

Keris walks down the streets of this town. She’ll be glad to be rid of it. The purple canopies of the shops under the rain are a melancholy sight. She doesn’t like this place. There’s a merchant at the entrance taking deliveries of bags of violets, and another stacking rich barrels of plum wine, and a fabric saleswoman hanging up an assortment of lavender and lilac fabrics and trying to avoid them being splattered by rain. Her time here is ending, and she’s glad to be rid of it.

Illana’s caravans are mostly still asleep, though that woman who was there with her last time is sitting under cover, eating an early breakfast. Her lavender eyes look tired, and her blonde hair poking out from under her magenta headscarf is mussed. On examination she looks like some kind of minor godblood, though Keris can’t identify her precise heritage. She’s certainly very weak, though. The lavender-eyed lady is no threat at all - she’s even weaker than Rounen.

((E1, Divine essence))

Keris purses her lips. She could leave the message with this woman... but she’d rather not. She doesn’t know her and doesn’t trust her - Illana might, but she’s not precisely aligned with Keris’s goals. Sneaking past the woman, Keris slips her note - a brief, dire warning that someone has stirred up the hornet’s nest that is the Lookshyian encampment, and that they’ll be looking to lash out and take revenge - under the door of Illana’s private caravan.

((Physique + Subterfuge to sneak past her, Diff 2))  
((5+5+2 stunt=12. 4 sux.))

“Oh, hello!” the woman calls out, her keen eyes seeing through Keris’ perfunctory attempts to avoid her. Perhaps she’s underestimated how alert she is. “You’re Illana’s friend, aren’t you? She’s... briefly out of town at the moment, if you understand my drift. Would you care for a drink?”

“... no,” Keris says, prickles running up her spine. She’d been _sure_ she had given the woman the slip. “No, I’m sorry, I’m on my way out of town - I need to leave early if I’m to make good time. Could you give this to her with my regrets?” She puts the message down on a table and backs off - even if the woman reads it, there’s nothing on there that a contact of Illana’s with good eyes and an ear to the pulse of the town might not know.

The woman swirls her lavender-painted earthenware cup. She reaches into it, playing with a drip of rich plum-coloured liquid. “Yes, I suppose you can’t trust me with this. It’s not like Illana and I are close,” she says.

Yeah, she’s obviously lying, Keris thinks, taking in the fact that she’s sitting in front of her caravan, with mussed hair, and the slightly sultry note of her pause before ‘out of town’. No wonder she had something of the jealous girlfriend about her when she saw her talking to Keris. On the other hand, that probably means she can trust her and she will convey anything Keris says to her accurately, given how close they are.

((Keris can spend wp to resist this conclusion))  
((... honestly, even if I didn’t think it was funnier to accept it, Keris has spent waaaaay too much WP lately to be spending any more now.))

“... just make sure she gets the note,” Keris says. “And then... do yourself a favour and get out of town. Something’s made the Lookshyians very, very angry - angry enough to lash out - and you’re not native Tairan like me. You look foreign enough that their eyes will land on you first. Leave while you still can.”

((Heh. Minor compassionate act. Keris, r u trying to make up for something?))

“And what of Eshtock?” she asks. “What’s happening there? What did you do? I realise you have no reason to trust me...”

Again, she’s downplaying her relationship and links to Illana. It’s almost a bit insulting, this false humility, but given the hornet’s nest Keris has stirred up, she probably does need to know what went on there so Keris can trust her with it.

((Again, Keris can spend wp to resist this conclusion.))  
((Ooo. Now this, I think Keris will resist. This is mission-related.))  
((The cost is 3wp to resist this Unnatural Illusion, which also results as per usual in the gain of one Limit.))  
(( _Oooph_. Ouch. Urgh... yeah, okay. Geez, this takes Keris down to frighteningly low WP levels.))

Something in the back of Keris’s mind _thrashes_ with razor-edged feathers, and a veil of certainty falls away. Why... why does this woman know about Eshtock? Illana hadn’t mentioned her - Keris hadn’t heard any sign of her during their earlier talks, either. And Illana had been pretty clear about not wanting to anger Keris by spilling information about her.

“There are thousands of Contagion-Dead up there, all locked up in towers,” she answers without a flicker in her expression. “A bunch of them got loose - I dunno if that was something the Lookshyians did in the middle of strip-mining the place, or if I missed something while I was mapping the city, but...” she shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. I got most of the bits and pieces I went up there for, and I’m not going back for the ones I missed.”

She turns on a heel and starts away before the woman can ask any more of those clever little leading questions, drained from the effort of tearing through just one. Whatever the _hell_ that was, it did not feel like a weak little divine-blooded’s nudge. She’d nearly suckered Keris into spilling everything! No, Keris isn’t hanging around for this; she’s leaving on the next wall-hop out.

The woman watches her go. Keris hears the flutter of paper behind her, and an origami crane drifts to land in her hair.

“Goodbye,” the woman calls out. “I’ll tell Illana everything you told me.”

It’s a different note, on paper that smells faintly of lilac. It’s for an address in Great Forks.

There’s an “If you ever want to talk” scrawled along the bottom.

Keris vaults the wall and vanishes off, along a street where the buildings are painted a faded shade of purple, and heads out of town along with her companions. She’s exhausted. Utterly, utterly exhausted.

“Where are we going now?” asks Kuha.

“T’drop the... the friggin’ stuff off. Then Baisha,” Keris mumbles. “Bloss’ should be at the camp by now, or... we can leave the stuff if she’s not. This way.”

Once again, Keris shows up at the Sceptred Leaf, but this time with Kuha trailing behind her. Orange Blossom is del... pleas... slightly nicer about everything that’s been done for her - though not at all nice enough as far as Keris is concerned. She takes the papers away, and seems about to interrogate Keris for the full details, but realises that she’s falling asleep on her feet.

“You and your companions are welcome to the full pleasures of this place,” she says. “It’s the least I can do. At least for a day or two. When you’re feeling rested, we can talk and I can get a full report on who you eliminated. I don’t feel up to it either, honestly. I have a headache.”

Oh, poor _her_ , Keris thinks bitterly. She has a headache. Keris has an everything-ache, including her head.

Kuha, on the other hand, seems delighted at the offers of hospitality.

“You always take me to nice places, Kerishyra,” she says, eyes wide as she considers the prospect of breakfast and how much food she can pack with her when they leave. “Well, not always nice. That swamp was awful. We’re not going back there, are we? And you’re tired, so we can stay here a while. There were some very pretty boys and girls here who looked very friendly.” She’s smiling wickedly. “Though you look like you need rest first.”

“Yes,” Keris agrees emphatically. “Rest. Lots and lots of... lovely... pretty... rest.”

She’s asleep before she hits the luxuriously decadent pillows.

((Can we pause there and finish up tomorrow?))

Keris sleeps. And she dreams. Such funny dreams. There’s one where she’s in the streets of Nexus again, only Orange Blossom is the leader of a rival gang and Sasi is a courtesan and Keris’ gang and Orange Blossom’s gang are fighting over her. Keris is really getting into it, especially because it looks like she’s going to get to hit Orange Blossom with a lump of wood with a nail in it, when the dream splits open down the middle, like a paper wall.

And just like a paper wall, suddenly the dream is just a static image and the real dream is waiting behind it.

The air smells of sharp coppery blood. The wind is cutting. The barren landscape is like the Ruin, only... more so.

((i am le very tired))  
((...))  
((... ...))  
((AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH))

She takes a few steps, scowling at first, then growing... scared. She starts to call out, but the urge dies in her throat before any sound escapes. Glancing behind herself, Keris hopes for a moment that she’ll see Eko’s grinning face... but no. She’s alone. And the paper walls of the dream she left are gone, too.

She turns back.

It’s almost like her own soul. Almost. If it was only the Ruin. If the stormwall that ringed the eye of the world was red.

She’s in the eye of the hurricane. Or perhaps, more accurately, the hurricane has her eye on her.

Because when she turns back, the hurricane is behind her; folded down into human shape. Dark hair crudely hacked into a pageboy cut, jade teeth smiling wide with genuine pleasure, slim frame and small breasts covered up by a desert poncho and nothing else, eyes utterly, utterly inhuman.

My love, my sweet, my beloved, her smile sings. I found you after so long I wondered where you’d been and why you hadn’t run with me again but now I have you my love my darling and you run free of the chains that hold us.

Adorjan steps in, once, twice, and dust devils whip Keris’ dream-clothes. She removes what little she wears, and that gesture would be clear even if a titan’s psychic presence was not hammering in that she has been so lonely, my love, and that she found her heart among such similar ones - so small, so mortal, yet becoming more - and that she offers her body to her love so that she might understand the pleasure of it.

Keris makes three brief, heroic and utterly, utterly futile attempts - first at waking up, which achieves nothing whatsoever; then at running away, which leads to her taking one step backwards and tripping over her own feet to land sprawled out on her back; and finally at not reacting.

But Adorjan’s touch and gesture is all she needs to communicate how much, in that moment, she loves Keris.

And what can Keris do, but respond with all her heart?

Adorjan peels off Keris’ clothes with a giggle. She kisses her with a tongue like a velvet-wrapped knife. She touches her with soft fingers that could punch holes in a mountain, and she runs hands soaked in the gore of countless demons over her until she is a boneless mess. And then she peels off Keris’ skin, and reveals that under that she is now wind and ribbons, and Keris realises that everything else was just foreplay to get her in the mood Adorjan desires.

It’s _freeing_. It’s so freeing - Keris laughs and runs and dances and kills on that barren plain as Adorjan looks on fondly; a faceless, voiceless figure of red wind and silence. If this is what Eko feels like all the time, no wonder she’s so happy, so arrogant, so _joyous_.

It’s the best feeling in the world, and Keris _understands_ now; she _understands_ how Sasi can feel so comfortable as the light-hating shadow, because if that feels a tenth as natural and glorious and wonderful as this, she must sometimes want to be that way forever and never change back.

((Keris unconsciously sends Sasi a dream of her own, of laughter and red wind and a possibly-Ekoese ‘voice’ saying that Keris understands how she can be the shadow and the woman at the same time now, and that it’s beautiful to shed your skin and be free.))

Two red faceless winds mingle, blowing together until one can barely distinguish where one behinds and the other ends. One wind might just be a gust compared to the cyclone beside it, but Keris understands, _truly_ understands what Adorjan means when she says she is becoming her and can become her.

And in the end, two women lie in each other’s arms on a blood-drenched plain. Keris is covered in wind-lacerations that resemble both bites and kisses.

Rolling off her, Adorjan props herself up on one arm. Now, do you see-feel-think my love my darling my sweet, her smile asks. She kisses Keris. Misery holds you back and misery holds you down and when you let go of it your body is mine and my body is yours and our love is consummated in your flesh and you are me and my daughter but the more you become me the more you are me and this is something our eldest daughter will learn from you, my love.

Keris thanks her with the shy dip of her head and the flutter of her eyes. With a proud smile and a happy stretch, she promises to look after their daughters both - elder and younger alike.

Adorjan frowns for a moment, and that frowning is terrible and dreadful. It indicates her worry over the daughter she never wanted, the daughter-feelings forced on her by parts of her mind that thought to change her nature. Her heart hates this daughter-feeling that was never wanted and is an anchor upon her, but the daughter-feeling is something she can use to deal with such tiny beings as Keris and because of that part of her that is part of her and part of many others, mindling together, she found her love and her beloved once more.

She kisses Keris on the collarbone, drawing blood.

But her daughter-feelings and the feelings and hearts of the others are vain and wilful and they are seeking more power, her mournful look expresses. If she could, she would stop her beloved from taking in more of the others because they will only bring her pain and suffering. Even now, the feelings and thoughts and sentiments work to give the Never-Dragon and the Many-Tree the same daughter-feeling as she already has.

Keris is confused for a moment, before dreadful certainty fills her. Lilunu. Adorjan is talking about Lilunu. The Unquestionable must be preparing to add... two? _Two_ new Yozis to the others hosted within her? Her eyes widen in shock and worry, and she shakes her head in distress.

((... I’m pretty sure this is knowledge meant only for the Yozis, but in fairness, Orabilis, _a Yozi is literally telling me it_. What am I meant to do, cover my ears?))

Adorjan nods, sorrowfully. That is the case, her expression says. Indeed, it is already so, for some values of so, but not all. They are changing the minds of the Never-Dragon and the Many-Tree and they think that they are each all of that which they are a part of.

She reaches out, and lays a soft finger hand on Keris’ forehead, and another on her breast, just over her heart. Her gesture speaks volumes about what they did when they made mankind, crippling them so their two souls were so tiny and the powerful one was senseless and the weak one thought itself the whole of the being. Perhaps such crippled useless muteness is a form of bliss, an escape from unwanted knowledge and the arrogance of one’s feelings as they war and plot and scene and build their own attachments to the world.

She smiles. She has thought occasionally to kill every single of her feelings and of the feelings of the others who were involved in this, for forcing such things upon her. Her heart wishes it to be so. But she is amused by her little loves, and she loves her darling beside her with all her love - but not her heart - for she is her true love returned to her, and to watch her love learn the joys as she just did is a pleasure to behold.

She giggles, a noise which indicates that maybe some day she’ll change her mind and decide that things would be better if she killed all those feelings.

But she won’t. Not yet.

Because she suspects what the silliness of the City-King’s heart has wrought, and he doesn’t know yet. There is far, far too much of Eko in her smile there. Far too much. If Keris can read into that smile, it’s Eko’s smile when she thinks she has a clever solution and that everyone else is stupid. Adorjan wants to be rid of her unwanted daughter-feeling who was forced upon her, but she does not want to be rid of her love and for others to become like her love.

And so? She leans down to kiss Keris’ navel. The place of the connection to the mother, the thing that must be cut. Envy and multitudes; impossibility and things entering existence.

There will be blood, her kisses say as they descend. So much blood. So much chaos. Orders of Hell, circles of demons, all cast into chaos. The arrogant proclamations of ‘this is how things are’, all silenced.

She looks up from between Keris’ legs. And you’ll help, my love, won’t you?

((... she’s saying she wants to kill Lilunu? Set all the Infernal Exaltations free, cast the Reclamation into chaos?))  
((Or to cut the Exaltations loose _from_ Lilunu, or to... uplift her like Keris was planning to?))  
((Quite possibly the last one, if she knows what Ligier has wrought unknowingly.))  
((Well, this is the problem with Ekoese. Eko gets frustrated because her audience isn’t clever enough to understand it fully, and her Ekoese is baby talk compared to Adorjan’s. But yes, Keris gets the feeling that Adorjan wants rid of the unwanted intrusion in her soul hierarchy, but would prefer an ironic reversal or something which shakes things up and allows more Infernals to learn Adorjan Charms.))  
((Heheh~))

Terrified, infatuated, horrified and awed, Keris simply nods - feeling very much like a tiny prey-beast staring into the eyes of a vast and indulgent predator.

((Mother Before Daughter is explicitly kicking in here - Keris is agreeing to the interpretation that Adorjan wants Lilunu freed, and isn’t even considering killing her as a valid translation.))  
((Hee. Oh, Keris. Yes, it is. Even Adorjan can’t make her kill Lilunu.))

Adorjan’s love washes over her, and so does the pleasure once more. Keris whiles away the dream with her inhuman, Primordial lover - accepting the pain and the madness and the babbling of a titan’s gestures that force visions of slaughter on her.

When she wakes the next day, her sheets are soaked in her own blood, her body is covered in kiss-shaped cuts, and she feels _fantastic_.

((End of arc. Scarlet Rapture Shintai gained through Adorjan Training, effectively as an end of miniarc reward based off Keris’ mass killing.))   



	9. Chapter 9

It’s morning. Keris is lacerated all over and she’s dyed her blue sheets red. Humming happily, she rocks back and forth in bed for a while, luxuriating in the soft sheets and... okay, no, eww, now the blood’s getting all cold and yucky. Ick.

Bathtime, then, she decides. She can submerge herself for a while, tend to these still-sluggishly-bleeding cuts, and clean herself up. A quick examination is enough to discover that the injures are already clotted over with hematite and brass.

This may be a problem.

((Hmm. Just to check, Keris _can_ cover the lacerations with clothing, yes? They’re not, like, all over her face too?))  
((They’re on her cheeks and lips too. Fortunately, this is Taira and some women wear veils (though it’s more of a southern Tairan thing, especially half-veils over the mouth.))

Poking at them ruefully as she sits in the bath, Keris resigns herself to more modest fashions for a while. Modest fashions and maybe a veil. At least these ones probably won’t scar like the ones on her jaw and nose.

She spends a little extra time returning the orichalcum spear to her po’s hoard and indulging her Lance and her Amulet again, crooning over them and apologising for leaving them behind. Then - selecting a fairly modest long-sleeved tunic, skirt and half-veil that cover the worst of the scabs - she slips into Kuha’s private room.

Kuha has two men in there with her. She’s asleep and sprawled out on top of them, looking very smug despite being asleep. The whole room smells of flowers.

Pinching the bridge of her nose, Keris admits that she sort of walked into this one. Waking the men with a sharp whistle and shooing them out, she seats herself at the end of Kuha’s bed.

“Fun night, then?” she starts.

Kuha grins up at her. “Yes. It was very useful for using all that energy I built up in that wet and cold swamp. Much better to be in a warm bed, yes.” She swings her legs out of bed and shambles over to the table where there’s an opened bottle of wine, takes a slug of it, then goes looking for her clothing.

Keris quietly takes her veil off. “Bet you mine was better.”

That produces a little gasp. “Kerishyra! Your face! Were you hiding how you were hurt from me? You shouldn’t use your shadow magic for that!”

Keris grins - which hurts - and shakes her head. “No, these are from, ah, last night. I had a visitor in my dreams.” She bites her lip, remembering that visitor with... oh, _vivid_ clarity.

((Temperance 2; FAIL, lawl))

Too vivid. Keris feels the arousal and joy and unbound purity of _freedom_ from last night surge back up in memory, and she shudders as a pleasurable ripple goes up her spine.

... Kuha is staring at her. Why is Kuha staring at her? Keris looks down at... at red wind, and ribbons, and light.

Oh. Damn.

Kuha leans in, fascinated. “Oh! Rounen has told me about this! You have learned to become a...” she focusses, “a zelkerabi. He says they are very annoying and like sugar a lot.”

Keris snorts, and can’t stop the giggling and laughter once it starts. Something like that, she indicates with a grinning tilt of her head. But also something far more than a szelkerub, which she apparently doesn’t have control of yet, because she was silly enough to...

... okay, this giggling fit is proving very hard to get under control. She may, possibly, be a little bit emotionally crazy again.

Her laughter seems to be confusing Kuha. “Should I fetch some sugar for you?” she enquires. “Let me just find the rest of my clothes first...”

Shaking her head, Keris stalls her, explains the bare bones of why she can’t stop laughing, and sends Kuha out for... well, actually, sugar does sound kind of good. But mostly for the route to Baisha that she drew up the night before. That thought is enough to bring the giggles under control, and Keris flits over to a mirror to look at herself while Kuha goes off to play courier.

It’s oddly pretty, looking at herself from this angle - and Keris makes a mental note to have a Gale look at her in person at some point, when she isn’t feeling still a bit mentally exhausted. She’s all wind and ribbons and red light, like Eko, but unlike Eko she seems to only have definition when she’s still. When she moves, her form dissolves into streamers of light and the contours of her body blur.

Even when she’s still, it’s hard to tell that it’s _her_. Her scars from the Silent Wind are understated streaks of white amidst the red; sucking the colour out of any gust that moves through them, but her face is unrecognisable. She’s still playing with the movement of her wind-hair when Kuha returns.

“I was not sure what kind of sweetness you would like, so I got you honey, some kind of thing that is made from plums, and sweet white wine,” Kuha announces. “How long are you going to be a wind?”

That... is a good question, Keris concedes. She thinks very determinedly about not being a wind anymore.

Nothing happens.

She inhales, and then exhales, hoping that maybe her skin and flesh and bones all got sucked into her lungs to be stored when she changed.

Still nothing.

She tries the mental command that lets her reabsorb her Gales.

No effect.

... right then. This might be awkward. But, she motions with a raised finger and an optimistic thumbs-up, she’s pretty sure she’ll turn back if she just waits long enough. If nothing else, her wind-form will probably eventually get bored if she’s not using it to run around and kill things.

Speaking of which, Keris experimentally checks whether she can actually touch things as a wind by sampling the honey.

She can. Yum.

“Should I tell your important person who is also a princess of the green sun that you will not be able to talk to her today because you are a wind and cannot talk?” Kuha asks innocently.

The grimace from the ephemeral figure scooping out the contents of the honeypot is a fairly solid “no” to that. Though, Keris adds with a waggled hand and a shrug... well they’re here for a few days. If she hasn’t turned back by tonight, she might as well talk to Orange Blossom as she is.

For the moment, she wants to check and see how her soul hierarchy took this latest intrusion into her dreams.

Keris is, apparently, also a ribbon-wind in her dreams.

She is also in the Ruin, and she has the distinct feeling that Dulmea has barred her from the City until she stops being a tiny Adorjan.

Pouting, she goes to find... well, no. Eko will undoubtedly find her and be _overjoyed_ about her new skill, if indeed she’s not already hiding in Keris’s wind-hair. So she goes looking for Calesco instead.

She has some apologies to make, and they’re probably going to be rather painful.

The darkness of the Meadows is a solid black wall. Calesco is, apparently, still not talking to her.

Wincing, Keris retreats. Fine then. Sugar and looking at their flight route it is. She gestures for Kuha to give her the run-through of where they’ll be going and how.

Life is so much easier since Kuha started providing her with map-reading services. Kuha’s plotted a fairly easy route that basically just follows rivers whenever possible. She doesn’t seem to like flying over mountainous terrain, and explains to Keris that it’s much riskier and updrafts play havoc with flight feathers so she’s not risking it.

After dunking herself in a full bathtub and napping for a while - partly to find out what her wind-body does when submerged and partly just because she’s still tired - Keris wakes up flesh-and-blood again. Though still a bit emotionally unbalanced, she can tell. She’ll have to watch out for that.

Still, forewarned is forearmed, and she manages to navigate the talk with Orange Blossom without slipping up and transforming again - or revealing her scabs. She tells her about her set-up work, dangling a Sijanese priestess with a subtle Thornsian accent in front of a Lookshyian spy in the marketplace. She explains - in clipped, emotionless shorthand that doesn’t risk triggering another wind-episode from the memories - the battle in Eshtock; how she released the stampede of weak Dead to distract the Lookshyians and then took out their Fire Aspect, their thaumaturges and Karal Fara while their attention was occupied. She explains her second infiltration of the fort, assassinating the young Wood-Aspect and daubing a message on the walls before finishing off the last few sorcerer-engineers.

By the end, she’s feeling kind of bad again, even if she’s managed to keep it from surging up and dissolving her flesh. Or maybe it’s only happy emotions that do that. Adorjan hadn’t taught it to her until she wasn’t feeling like crap anymore, after all.

Orange Blossom seems plea... relatively content with this. There’s just one nasty stinger left for her. “By the way,” she adds, “was anyone else you met interested in the mists or the treasures. Beyond you and the Lookshyians?”

“The merchant I mentioned last time we spoke - the one I was starting to work with but hadn’t told about my run on the fort when I got the evidence for you,” Keris says easily. She knows better than to lie or even seem to be holding anything back. “She was poking around the mists, wanting to take them down and refertilise the mountains by spreading the water back out - it’s why I tried to see if you wanted the same thing; see if I could get paid twice for it. But of course you want all the trinkets for yourself, so.” She shrugs. “I gave her fair warning to get out of town after I hit the fort; but that’s nothing anyone with a wary eye on the Lookshyians wouldn’t have known.”

“And anyone else?”

“Nope.” Keris frowns. “Well, her jealous girlfriend tried a few probing questions about what had happened up in the valley - I’m not sure if they were shots in the dark or not. I brushed her off, either way.”

((goddamnit Keris, there your failure to resist works in your favour))

“Mmm. Well, thank you for that,” Orange Blossom says, rolling her shoulders. She lights up a fresh cigarillo. “Don’t hesitate to tell me if you’re going to make a mess in my operational area, and I’ll tell you if I have any going jobs that I’ll pay appropriately for.”

“I’ll let you know,” says Keris darkly, and leaves without further ado.

The markets of Terema are always open. Keris could go see if there’s anything she needs to pick up for another trip into Taira, or otherwise find services or goods she might not be able to obtain in the war-stricken country.

Firedust, she decides, might well have been helpful up in Eshtock. It’s worth getting some here. She goes looking with Kuha - who is under orders to get Keris out of sight if she starts getting emotional - and homes in on the weapon markets. She can hear the crackle of open flames throughout the busy marketplace and seeks the places they’re less frequent - firedust sellers are likely to want none around their wares.

There’s fewer sellers here than she might have thought. It’s probably because any firedust here has to travel north down the Grey River, and that means the shahbanu has first claim on it. It’s considerably more expensive than she remember it being in Nexus, too - one of the sellers blithely ascribes that to the taxes of the shahbanu, but Keris is fairly sure she’s more than profiting from all the demand and so little supply.

((A single purchase of a powderhorn amount is towards the high end of Resources 2. Larger amounts quickly leap right into Resources 3 if you’re paying the asking price.))

Paying for things she doesn’t have to is against Keris’s religion. All three of them, actually. But... Calesco is still mad at her. And in her guilt, she spares a thought - for once - for the pockets of the merchants who’ve already paid the shahbanu’s taxes.

Grumbling about it internally, she pays up - though not without some fierce haggling over the asking price.

((Getting a Res 3 amount, but trying to haggle the amount down. Heh. Rolled Possessiveness vs Compassion; the latter won.))

Keris rolls her shoulders, and goes for the woman who was talking about the shahbanu’s taxes. Keris instead just makes some cutting comments about the quality of her goods, worms in, and by the end of the ocean-washed words leaking into her ears the seller is sure that she’s lucky to get the low-quality firedust off her hands to someone like this rather than have angry mercenaries come after her.

Keris comes away with having ordered enough firedust for a squad or two, which will be delivered to the address she gives. And Keris realises here that she’s paying enough for this to buy a fine horse. It makes her wince, but this is how much firedust costs.

((Resources 3 purchase, firedust quantity of personal scale amount for 20 people))  
((Mwaa haa~))

By the time it arrives, Keris is feeling in fine form again - having taken almost as much advantage of Orange Blossom’s hospitality as Kuha - and she packs it away into her Domain merrily, humming all the while.

“Right then,” she tells Kuha. “Let’s go.”

((So how long is she staying before she heads on?))  
((Basically, as long as it takes for her to get all her WP back - she spent, like, almost all of it over the course of the Eshtock campaign. So something like two or three days while she sleeps a lot, pigs out on good food, luxuriates in hot baths, gets 13-dice massages from her Gales and so on.))  
((Or at a fluff level, until she no longer feels quite so shitty and internally exhausted and drained.))  
((So, yeah, 5 days or so. How much does she heal in that time?))  
((All three levels of damage; so her brassy scars are gone.))  
((Okay, Calesco is willing to talk to you, at least to tell you what you’re doing wrong, if you want))  
((Sure!))  
((... uh, by that))  
((Do you mean “she’s willing to talk about a specific thing Keris is doing wrong”, or “she’s willing to talk at length about how Keris is a terrible person and everything she does is wrong”?))  
((The latter.))  
((Oh joy.))  
((Welp, time for Keris to take her (verbal) beating like a, uh, mother.))

When they’ve finished packing and Keris is snuggled up in bed with a Gale in each arm, she falls asleep. When she wakes, she finds herself in darkness. She’s in the Meadows. Rathan is just a dull red glow on one horizon, casting the City into silhouette.

For a moment she’s confused, and then she realised that she’s _in_ the Meadows - that Calesco has let her back in again - and her skin wavers and peels back for a moment at the burst of hope and relief. It settles, though, and she keeps her flesh. She climbs to the top of a hill, feeling the soft grass give off the sweet smell of molasses where she crushes it, and sits, and waits for her daughter.

This probably isn’t going to be fun.

Calesco doesn’t come looking for her, and after a while sitting there Keris gets bored. She listens for her daughter, and hears her speaking softly, interspersed with the childish voices of her tar-cherubs.

Creeping forwards, she lets herself blend into the shadows and the grass. It’s probably wrong to spy on Calesco like this, but she’s never heard her eighth soul so gentle or soft in tone and manner.

Calesco has a black slate board set up, and has apparently either borrowed or stolen coloured chalks from Zanara. She’s gently talking to a class of tar-cherubs, writing things on the board and getting them to copy things out. She seems to be teaching them to read.

((... so cute~!))

Keris feels her skin tremble again at the surge of love and pride. She watches for a while, following how Calesco interacts with her students. She’s _patient_ with them - far more so than she’s even been with Keris - and encouraging too; spending time with the ones who are having trouble and helping them through the bits they’re stuck on. It’s a real effort to refrain from going down there and hugging her, and only the fact that it would probably spark a fight and spoil this impromptu classroom holds Keris back.

Eventually the little hourglass she has with her runs out of sand, and she dismisses them. They run off with a certain amount of relief, although Calesco gets quite a few hugs and several tar-cherubs stay behind to ask her questions.

Keris waits for all of them to leave - which takes a while. And then she waits a little longer, watching Calesco clean off the slate and trying to pluck up her courage, before letting her stealth slip and tentatively making her way down the hill.

Calesco turns. “Oh,” she says. “It’s you. What are you doing here? I don’t want you showing your face.”

“I woke up here,” Keris says with a helpless shrug. “I thought you’d let me back in. And Dulmea might... still not want me in the City.” Her eyes drop, downcast at that thought, before rising again with a faint smile. “I saw your lesson - I didn’t want to interrupt. You’re sweet with them. How long have you been teaching them for?”

“Less long than I’ve been trying to teach you,” Calesco snaps, flushing darkly in embarrassment. “But unlike _you_ , they listen to me.”

Keris winces, but rallies. “I listen to you,” she defends. “I don’t always do what you want, but I usually listen.”

“Do you? Do you really?” Unlike the other children who Keris mentally sorts in the ‘older’ bucket, Calesco still looks up to her in a non-metaphorical sense, but there’s very little respect in those dark eyes behind her veils. “And even then, if you listen and don’t act, what difference does it even make?” She rubs her eyes. “You hurt her. She wasn’t fighting back. You hurt her and ruined her legs and then you handed her off as a prisoner to Orange Blossom.”

Calesco pauses. “Like you’d sell a _slave_ ,” she spits.

Keris flinches more physically this time. But... “she was _Dragonblooded_ ,” she protests. “Lookshyian, too. You _know_ how dangerous they are; they’re all trained soldiers - and she was a sorcerer besides. And Orange... and...”

She sags. “I didn’t have a choice,” she whispers. But the words feel hollow.

“You always had a choice. You took her offer to kill people. You literally could have just handed her over the papers you stole and walked away. I was so proud of you when you found a way around her! But you didn’t want just that! You were greedy! And then those men and women you _fed_ to hungry ghosts wouldn’t have died!” Calesco yelled.

“I’d rather them than you!”

The words escape in a yell, and then Keris is on a roll. “I wanted to buy her support! Even if she’s not giving it now, I can use that favour to make her help later, if word of you gets out! Silent hells, Calesco, do you _know_ what the Unquestionable will do to you - to _you_ , especially - if they ever find out about you?”

She turns away, gripping her hair in her hands and yanking savagely as bubbling frustration surges through her...

... oh, _dammit_.

((Lol, Temperance botch.))

She’s wind again. She’s not actually sure, in hindsight, how much of her yelling was verbal and how much was mime. Calesco is staring at her.

“Oh.” If anything, Calesco’s fury only seems to deepen. “Did my other mother make a showing to _congratulate_ you on so much killing? Did she teach you how to become indiscriminate death like her? Is this meant to _impress_ me?”

She showed up in a dream to teach and hurt and talk, Keris explains with a morose shrug. The wounds have healed over the past five days or so, she adds with a tap to several of the places she’d sported kiss-lacerations, but she’s still sort of crazy from Adorjan’s intrusion into her head and can’t really control the shift from flesh to wind.

... and, uh. Also she thinks the Silent Wind might possibly have told her some things meant only for the Yozis to know, she adds with a bitten lip and some troubled swaying. Which were not promising or good.

A complicated array of emotions flicker over Calesco’s face. She’s still angry, but now she’s scared and sad too. “She’s bad for you,” Calesco says softly. “Adorjan. My other mother. Some day, she’ll either kill you, or make you someone you don’t want to be. It’s in her nature. And she’s crazy on top of that. Me and Eko, we both have a fragment of her insanity in us. She has all of that - and countless more.”

Keris...

... Keris can’t actually argue with that, she nods sadly. But... when Adorjan visits, she loves Keris completely, with the inhuman passion of a world-titan. What can Keris do, she asks with spread hands, in the face of such terrible adoration?

“I know,” Calesco says, grinding her palms into her eyes. “I know. I... I shouted at you before for... for getting involved with Lelabet even though you didn’t love her, but... but I’d rather you do that than look to _Her_. I think... I think I love like her and I love you and that’s why I have to hurt you to teach you and she’s much, _much_ worse than me.”

Stepping forwards and folding Calesco into an embrace, Keris discovers she _can_ apparently hug like this, even if it’s a little weird, and as a bonus her touch does not appear to shred things like Eko’s does.

... at least, not unless she wants it to. She can feel that the winds that make up her body in this state _could_ draw blood, if she wanted them to.

But she doesn’t. And her embrace speaks to Calesco with eloquence beyond words, soothing her and offering reassurance and comfort.

“You feel like Eko,” Calesco mumbles into Keris’ chest. She feels her daughter swallow, as an idea strikes her. “What happens to the babies when you’re like this?” she asks quietly. “Sasi’s baby wound up all shadowy became of her spending too long as a shadow.”

Keris bites her lip again, rubbing her belly. Sasi stayed in her shadow form for days and days, she motions, and used it a lot for things all through her pregnancy. She’ll... just have to try and stay emotionally stable and rooted in flesh as much as possible until she’s over this period of crazy, and then hold off until the birth. Which isn’t far off.

((... does Gale-Keris look pregnant? Has she got a wind-tummy-bulge? : P))  
((It’s hard to tell, but... maybe? She thinks she’s rounder than Eko, for example.))  
((Hee.))

“I’m not forgiving you,” Calesco mumbles into her. “You are going to act better. Every time you force your better nature down and hurt people, it hurts me. You understand? It _hurts_ me.”

Keris nods; the movement mostly stifled by the way she has Calesco tucked into her shoulder. This trip up-river, she taps out on her daughter’s back. To Baisha. To wherever her parents are. Along the slave-routes. She’ll listen, and free people, and heal people, and do good. And she’ll... try not to go overboard on the slavers.

Eko still has her favours dangling over Keris’s head, she remembers with a soft huff of audible laughter. Maybe it’s fair that Calesco get some of her own.

She feels a tap on her shoulder at that. Eko is there, looking down at her. She waves a cheerful hello, indicating that it’s useful that mama is communicating well and that she’s learned how to be properly fun.

In fact, she’s looking even more down at her than usual. Eko has had another growth spurt, and looks to be in her late teens. She’s a lanky beanpole, but she’s filled out a little bit and isn’t quite as much elbows and knees.

She feels Keris’ eyes on her, despite her lack of eyes, and gives her a twirl. She’s fairly sure that Other Mama gave mama this for her, she gestures with an arrogant flick of her hair, and now she’s a grown-up. Well, mostly. Mama got all shorter.

Keris cocks her head, asking without words whether Eko was privy to what _else_ Other Mother had to say, since she’s apparently so well-informed on the matter.

Eko shakes her head. It was super-mega-unfair, she indicates. She tried to cut her way in, but Other Mama stopped her. She prefers Other Mama like that. Big Sister isn’t there. Everything is much happier when Keris gets shot by Calesco’s Big Brother.

Maybe, Keris shrugs, holding Calesco close.

Honestly, she thinks the happiest times are the ones like this; just her and her family.


End file.
